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vtnerd Full-Time 2020 Q4

vtnerd Full-Time 2020 Q4

by Lee Clagett (vtnerd)

October 15, 2020

224.6 XMR

13 contributors

Completed

3-Months full-time software development on monero "core" components in 2020 q4 (through early 2021).

What

Work primarily on the monerod and wallet2 base code (perhaps some monero-lws as well, provided supporters find this acceptable). Some of the work to be attempted or investigated:

  • Adding DANE support to wallet2/epee SSL (unbound->OpenSSL 1.1) to enhance wallet->monerod security. This allows for SSL without root certificate signing (relies on dnssec, which unfortunately has its own root+zone certificate chain). Also allows for "pinning" to a specific CA (so root CA + dnssec check).
  • Adding trust-on-first-use support to wallet2 if DANE and CA are unavailable
  • TLS certificate sharing for public RPC nodes. Possible to "piggy-back" on curve25519 keys for p2p stuff (see next point).
  • Adding encryption+authentication to p2p connections. I have a proposal written (separate CCS entirely?) for either TLS 1.3 or Noise_XK depending on community goals. The proposal is unique from prior attempts because it attempts to authenticate the connection.
  • Pontential performance improvements
    • Various epee/p2p serialization (output) routines (some examples, will need more profiling):
      • Improve container reading/writing in epee serialization
      • Switching from std::ostringstream in the binary output to direct byte slice output
      • Adding byte_slice internally so that binary values copy pointers instead of data
    • Improvements to "cryptonote" serialization - risky since its used by blocks+transactions internally, but theres much speed to be gained in that code
  • Potential compilation improvements:
    • Moving some epee stuff from headers into cpp to reduce includes as performance is being modified
    • Moving serialization code to cpp (although this could be spurious in updates which is frowned upon)
    • Dropping unnecessary includes from epee and few other core files. boost::lexical_cast is a top candidate for instance
    • Dropping the templated nature of the epee TCP server would yield best improvement, but might be cause too much "pain" in the review

There's quite a lot listed there, and its unlikely that all bulletpoints will be reached. There should be enough work in a 3month period though.

Who

Lee Clagett (vtnerd). I have a prior CCS for adding I2P/Tor support to the wallet and daemon which is completed, pending community members adding seed nodes for I2P/Tor. I also implemented Dandelion++, ZeroMQ Pub/Sub in daemon, various performance improvements to ZeroMQ JSON, monero-lws, x86-64 ASM speedups for wallet scanning, and other assorted daemon bug fixes or changes.

Proposal

Work on the various tasks outlined above for 40 hours/week over the next 3 months after potential funding. I already use time-tracking software for work; if the hours dip in a given month unexpectedly, the update/milestone will be at the completion of the hours listed above.

The funds were calculated with 55 USD/hour with ~117.55 USD/XMR which is the 14-day exponential moving average on Kraken through 2020/10/14.

Community Discussion and Updates

View community discussion, comments, and proposal updates on GitLab

Month 1 (160 hours)

To be paid: 74 XMR

Completion date: 27 November 2020

Month 2 (320 hours)

To be paid: 74 XMR

Completion date: 06 January 2021

Month 3 (480 hours)

To be paid: 76.6 XMR

Completion date: 15 February 2021

Funds Awarded: 74

Date: 30 December 2020

Funds Awarded: 150.6

Date: 6 August 2021