N0TH1NG T0 H1D3

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
Legal entity Requests
n/a 0

1.3 Natural persons

Natural person Requests
John Doe 0

2 Service report

2.1 Tor relays

Tor relays

178

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.