Progress! Goals! Collaboration!

We are reporting in with more progress updates on our fundraising, more specifics on our goals, and some positive news about collaboration.

Fundraising:
We have secured substantially more funding over the last few days, increasing our total cash raised to $41000. This places us at about 60% of our $71000 goal! We have had widespread support for the effort and now have a coalition of 21 companies and many individual donors from around the world.

We have completed our first round of contact with every VPN company in the world, and are now moving on to web hosting companies, internet security companies, and other businesses who are likely interested in a stronger OpenVPN.

The community has done a great job of getting the word out, and we need to keep it up! Be loud! If you’ve donated, give us a shoutout on Twitter ( @ostifofficial ) or tell your friends! Getting the word out is the greatest challenge we face, and you can help! If your VPN hasn’t donated yet, let them know that you want them to support the effort and get involved!

Goals:
We have finalized an agreement with QuarksLab on a price, duration, and depth of the audit. Our goal of $71000 is now cemented and we will be getting 45 man-days (about 650 man-hours) of auditing work done by a team of two senior researchers.

Collaboration:
As we had mentioned in our earlier postings, we were surprised to find out that a large VPN had decided to fund their own independent effort in full, and they had secured a top researcher to also evaluate the same version of OpenVPN that we were building this enormous effort to audit. We were concerned because the VPN company was not communicating with us, and we had heard through 3rd parties that they had no intention of collaborating with us. This worried us about our audit being seen as redundant or wasteful, even though experts in the field would agree that more review is always better.

We were hoping for a situation where the two audits could work together to make the greatest impact for OpenVPN, by auditing complementary areas of code or sharing results with one another to avoid redundancies and wasted effort by researchers.

We have be in contact with Dr. Green and we have had a positive conversation about collaboration. It looks like we will be able to turn these two separate audits into an even greater and more thorough review than either project would be able to do alone.