N0TH1NG T0 H1D3

Transparency Report November 2023

In November we kept on making preparations to increase the Nothing to hide organization’s robustness and resilience in 2024. Also we put quite some effort in finding the root cause of Tor’s inefficient use of our hardware, but sadly we didn’t get any more insights.

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

As a provider of pass-through anonimity services, Nothing to hide receives messages about network traffic originating from or destined for our networks on a daily basis. While the vast majority of these messages are general notices send by automated systems, some of them contain legitimate complaints, requests and/or (court) orders/subpoenas directed at Nothing to hide.

Below we report on the monthly amount of these messages we get from judicial authorities (courts, judges, juries), law enforcement agencies (LEA), business entities and natural persons.

Sender Complaints Requests Orders/subpoenas
Judicial authorities n/a 0 0
Law enforcement agencies n/a 0 0
Business entities 0 0 0
Natural persons 0 0 0

2 Service report

2.1 Tor relays

Tor relays

294

Bandwidth

35.6 Gb/s

Monthly traffic

11.550 TB

Traffic on the Tor network can fluctuate quite a bit within a month and the below metrics are merely snapshots of the final day of the month.

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
October 2023 6 288 37.7 Gb/s 407 TB 12.200 TB
November 2023 6 288 35.6 Gb/s 384 TB 11.550 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

3.300 per second

Daily queries

285 million

Monthly queries

8.5 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.

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
October 2023 3.400 294.000.000 8.800.000.000
November 2023 3.300 285.000.000 8.500.000.000

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%
October 2023 0.18% 2.9% 96.7% 18.02% 18.2% 81.5%
November 2023 0.12% 2.9% 96.7% 17.65% 18.8% 80.9%

It looks like some more FreeBSD exit relays were added to the network, which is a welcome sight.

2.4 DDoS attacks

Aside from the occasional (big) DDoS attack, it’s relatively quiet in terms of DDoS attacks.