Transparency Report Q4 2025

During the final quarter of the year, we encountered severe network performance issues that significantly impacted our Tor services. Despite extensive troubleshooting and optimization efforts, we anticipate that reaching full capacity will not be possible until our router migration is completed in Q1 2026.

In preparation for this transition to a new data center and upgraded hardware, we have finished building and configuring our next-generation servers. Optimized specifically for high-volume Tor relays and DNS, these systems will allow us to substantially scale our contribution to global privacy services. We are currently in the stress-testing and optimization phase to ensure a seamless and high-performance launch following a succesful migration.

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 anonymity 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 advertised bandwidth 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.

Because of severe network performance issues, our traffic in Q4 has been significantly reduced. We’re working on it. In addition there are some new medium to large scale operators active on the network, which is great for the Tor network’s health. Both our network issues and the addition of more Linux relays have not been beneficial for OS diversity on the network.

2.4 DDoS attacks

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