Transparency Report Q4 2024

In the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2024 we mostly continued our goals from Q3. This means 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. We will probably migrate to our new AS in Q1 2025. We also worked hard on the final steps to offer some basic DNS-over-TLS (DoT), DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ) services to the public.

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.

While we didn’t do much in terms of optimizing our relays or infrastructure in Q4, our consensus weight percentages for both guard and exit relays grew considerably. In December the Tor Project changed their policy on the maximum allowed consensus weight percentage a family should have to 20% for exit relays and 10% of total consensus weight. This means that the Nothing to hide family sadly pretty much hit its limit for exit relays. We can add a few more guard relays before we hit that limitation as well.

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 other things.