N0TH1NG T0 H1D3

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
Legal entity Requests
Digital Forensics Corp 1

1.3 Natural persons

Natural person Requests
John Doe 0

2 Service report

2.1 Tor relays

Tor relays

294

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.