Tor relays
294
Transparency Report December 2023
In December 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 | 1 |
| Law enforcement agencies | n/a | 2 | 0 |
| Business entities | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Natural persons | 0 | 0 | 0 |
2 Service report
2.1 Tor relays
Bandwidth
35.0 Gb/s
Monthly traffic
11.350 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 |
| December 2023 | 6 | 288 | 35.0 Gb/s | 378 TB | 11.350 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
276 million
Monthly queries
8.3 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 |
| December 2023 | 3.200 | 276.000.000 | 8.300.000.000 |
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% |
| December 2023 | 0.12% | 2.8% | 97.0% | 16.41% | 16.8% | 83.0% |
After a slight increase in BSD’s market share in November, GNU/Linux is steadily increasing its share of the Tor network again. This probably won’t change anytime soon sadly, especially not as long as the Tor relay software performs very poorly on our servers.
2.4 DDoS attacks
Aside from the occasional (big) DDoS attack, it’s relatively quiet in terms of DDoS attacks.