Transparency Report Q3 2024

In the third quarter (Q3) of 2024 we further advanced our efforts to increase the Nothing to hide organization’s robustness and resilience. We made more administrative and technical preparations to migrate our primary Tor infrastructure to our own autonomous system. The new secondary servers acquired in Q2 are also running well so it won’t be long before we can finally offer DNS-over-TLS (DoT), DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) to the public.

We didn’t have much time to research the experienced bottlenecks in Tor further, like we did in Q2. Instead we worked on setting up the formal organization Nothing to hide is a part of. Our project where we work on better DNS mitigation for correlation attacks and timeless timing attacks is slowly moving forward. We hope to provide some more substantial updates in Q4.

The metrics used in this report are rounded extrapolated snapshots of the final day of the quarter, 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 quarterly amount of these messages we get from judicial authorities (courts, judges, juries), law enforcement agencies (LEA), business entities and natural persons.

2 Service report

2.1 Tor relays

Traffic on the Tor network can fluctuate quite a bit and the below metrics are merely snapshots of a day around the end of the quarter.

Note that for these statistics both incoming and outgoing traffic are combined (just like Tor network’s metrics).

2.2 Tor DNS requests

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 recursors.

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.

In Q2 we converted some exit relays to be guard relays and while this increased our overall bandwidth and more than tripled the guard relay share of non-GNU/Linux operating systems, the exit relay share decreased considerably as a result. In Q3 we saw our exit relays attracting more traffic compared to many other Tor exit operators and as a result the exit relay share of GNU/Linux based relays decreased in favor of FreeBSD. Also it’s nice to see that in Q3 FreeBSD’s guard relay share increased by 1%. Well done to the operators running those relays.

2.4 DDoS attacks

Aside from the occasional (big) DDoS attack, it’s relatively quiet in terms of DDoS attacks. The Russian government must be busy with something else.