Tor relays
294
Transparency Report September 2023
In September we focust mostly on making the Nothing to hide organization more robust and resilient. The Tor relays we added in July are still growing in terms of consensus weight.
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 |
|---|---|
| Digital Forensics Corp | 1 |
1.3 Natural persons
| Natural person | Requests |
|---|---|
| John Doe | 0 |
2 Service report
2.1 Tor relays
Bandwidth
33.6 Gb/s
Monthly traffic
10.850 TB
Total traffic in September grew a tiny bit.
| 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 |
| July 2023 | 6 | 288 | 28.5 Gb/s | 308 TB | 9.250 TB |
| August 2023 | 6 | 288 | 32.7 Gb/s | 353 TB | 10.600 TB |
| September 2023 | 6 | 288 | 33.6 Gb/s | 362 TB | 10.850 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
3.000 per second
Daily queries
259 million
Monthly queries
7.8 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 September the amount of queries-per-second increased slightly due to the slight increase in 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 |
| July 2023 | 2.650 | 229.000.000 | 6.900.000.000 |
| August 2023 | 2.900 | 250.000.000 | 7.500.000.000 |
| September 2023 | 3.000 | 259.000.000 | 7.800.000.000 |
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% |
| July 2023 | 0.08% | 4.1% | 95.5% | 18.07 | 19.7% | 80.2% |
| August 2023 | 0.1% | 4% | 95.7% | 16.5 | 17.0% | 82.9% |
| September 2023 | 0.08% | 3.1% | 96.7% | 16.44% | 16.8% | 83.1% |
GNU/Linux is slowly but steadily increasing its share of the Tor network. This probably won’t change anytime soon sadly, especially not when Tor won’t perform well on modern hardware with many cores.
2.4 DDoS attacks
It’s still quiet in terms of DDoS attacks. We would like to keep it this way.