Tor relays
178
Transparency Report June 2023
In June we looked into the performance issues we experience with Tor. It looks like pretty much all multi-relay server setups have poor per-relay performance so it might actually just be the Tor network, Tor’s architecture or Tor’s implementation that is slow and inefficient. To further test this we made preparations for increasing the amount of Tor relays in different configurations in July.
The metrics used in this report are rounded extrapolated snapshots of the final day of the month, to not give away too much specific information.
1 Requests & orders
We received 0 official LEA requests this month.
1.1 Law enforcement agencies (LEA)
| LEA | Requests | Orders |
|---|---|---|
| n/a | 0 | 0 |
1.2 Legal entities
| Legal entity | Requests |
|---|---|
| n/a | 0 |
1.3 Natural persons
| Natural person | Requests |
|---|---|
| John Doe | 0 |
2 Service report
2.1 Tor relays
Bandwidth
23.5 Gb/s
Monthly traffic
7.600 TB
Last month some other relay operators increased the amount of relays and this increase seems to have stabilised for now because our exit share stayed around the same. In terms of bandwidth there was a significant decrease acros all relays (both ours and with other operators).
| Period | # Guard | # Exit | Bandwidth | Daily traffic | Monthly traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| November 2022 | 18 | 0 | 5.6 Gb/s | 60 TB | 1.800 TB |
| December 2022 | 34 | 18 | 12.8 Gb/s | 138 TB | 4.150 TB |
| January 2023 | 68 | 18 | 18.5 Gb/s | 200 TB | 6.000 TB |
| February 2023 | 3 | 124 | 22.5 Gb/s | 240 TB | 7.200 TB |
| March 2023 | 6 | 172 | 27.0 Gb/s | 290 TB | 8.700 TB |
| April 2023 | 6 | 172 | 26.0 Gb/s | 281 TB | 8.400 TB |
| May 2023 | 6 | 172 | 26.0 Gb/s | 281 TB | 8.400 TB |
| June 2023 | 6 | 172 | 23.5 Gb/s | 254 TB | 7.600 TB |
Note that for these statistics both incoming and outgoing traffic are combined (just like Tor network’s metrics).
2.2 Tor DNS requests
Query response
2.250 per second
Daily queries
194 million
Monthly queries
5.8 billion
DNS requests on the Tor network are resolved by the Tor exit relays. This means that high capacity Tor exit relays can generate a lot of DNS queries. These queries are being resolved by multiple high capacity DNS resolvers.
In June the amount of queries-per-second decreased a bit due to the lower overall bandwidth.
| Period | Query rate | Daily queries | Monthly queries |
|---|---|---|---|
| November 2022 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| December 2022 | 870 | 75.000.000 | 2.300.000.000 |
| January 2023 | 2.100 | 181.000.000 | 5.400.000.000 |
| February 2023 | 3.150 | 272.000.000 | 8.200.000.000 |
| March 2023 | 2.900 | 251.000.000 | 7.500.000.000 |
| April 2023 | 2.300 | 199.000.000 | 6.000.000.000 |
| May 2023 | 2.500 | 216.000.000 | 6.500.000.000 |
| June 2023 | 2.250 | 194.000.000 | 5.800.000.000 |
Do note that we don’t log the contents of DNS queries.
2.3 Tor diversity
One of our major goals is to break the GNU/Linux monoculture currently present on the Tor network. Monocultures in nature are dangerous, as vulnerabilities are held in common across a broad spectrum. In a globally used anonymity network, monocultures can be disastrous.
We make the Tor network stronger and more resilient by running all our relays on FreeBSD. Here we report on our ongoing effort to increase operating system diversity on the Tor network. If any Tor operator reading this is interested in running Tor relays on BSD, please contact us and we will gladly help out.
| Period | NTH Guard | BSD Guard | GNU Guard | NTH Exit | BSD Exit | GNU Exit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| November 2022 | 0.11% | 6.1% | 93.9% | 0.0% | 0.9% | 99.1% |
| December 2022 | 0.12% | 6.2% | 93.8% | 4.46% | 6.0% | 94.0% |
| January 2023 | 1.54% | 7.5% | 92.5% | 11.4% | 16.0% | 84.0% |
| February 2023 | 0.13% | 6.0% | 94.0% | 15.0% | 19.0% | 81.0% |
| March 2023 | 0.14% | 4.9% | 94.7% | 15.5% | 16.0% | 84.0% |
| April 2023 | 0.12% | 4.4% | 95.6% | 12.0% | 13.0% | 87.0% |
| May 2023 | 0.06% | 4.1% | 95.5% | 11.69% | 12.4% | 87.5% |
| June 2023 | 0.08% | 4.2% | 95.4% | 11.62% | 13.2% | 86.7% |
No big differences this month. In July we will experiment with increasing guard relays again.
2.4 DDoS attacks
It’s still quiet in terms of DDoS attacks. We would like to keep it this way.