Presented at
DEF CON 32 (2024),
Aug. 10, 2024, 3 p.m.
(45 minutes).
Millions of people around the world use Tor every day to protect themselves from surveillance and censorship. While the Tor Browser and its protocol are widely known, the backbone of the Tor ecosystem, its extensive network of volunteer relays, is often subject to speculation and misinformation. The Tor Project is dedicated to supporting this network and fostering a vibrant, diverse community of relay operators.
This talk will focus on our efforts to maintain a healthy network and community, and detect and mitigate attacks -- all with the help of metrics and analysis of usage patterns. By illustrating how we collect safe-enough metrics for an anonymity network, we will offer insights into how we identify unusual activity and other noteworthy events on the network. We will also discuss our ongoing strategies for addressing current and future network health challenges.
If you are interested in understanding the inner workings of the Tor network and its relay community and how we keep this vital ecosystem running, this talk is for you.
1. Network Health Team wiki: [link](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/wikis/home)
2. Two blog posts on Tor network health: [link](https://blog.torproject.org/malicious-relays-health-tor-network/) [link](https://blog.torproject.org/tor-network-community-health-update/)
3. Collector (where we archive all network data sets): [link](https://collector.torproject.org/)
4. Paper by Rob Jansen et al. on incentives schemes for relays on the Tor network, "Recruiting New Tor Relays with BRAIDS": [link](http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/braids_ccs.pdf)
5. Broader blog post about research papers on incentive for Tor relays: [link](https://blog.torproject.org/tor-incentives-research-roundup-goldstar-par-braids-lira-tears-and-torcoin/)
6. Research paper by NRL proposing how to measure relay performance in a way that resists attempts to lie about relay speed: [link](https://www.ohmygodel.com/publications/flashflow-icdcs2021.pdf)
7. Our plan to change how we collect, store and serve Tor network data (discussion from our bug tracker): [link](https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/metrics/collector/40012)
8. Performance measurements over the Tor Network: [link](https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html)
9. Onionperf is the tool we use to measure performances from different locations across the globe: [link](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/metrics/onionperf)
10. The number of relays on the network by relay flags: [link](https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html)
11. Documentation about reproducible metrics: [link](https://metrics.torproject.org/reproducible-metrics.html)
Presenters:
-
Silvia Puglisi
- Lead, Network Health at Tor Project
Silvia Puglisi is a Systems Engineer and Privacy Researcher based in Barcelona, EU. She currently leads the network health team at the Tor Project, focusing on maintaining the stability, performance, and security of the Tor network. Silvia is also an O'Reilly author and previously worked at Google for several years. She was part of the Information Security Group at the Department of Telematics Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where she earned her Ph.D. Additionally, she has served as an adjunct professor at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
-
Roger Dingledine
- Co-Founder and Original Developer at Tor Project
Roger Dingledine is co-founder and original developer of the Tor Project, a nonprofit that develops free and open source software to protect people from tracking, censorship, and surveillance online. Roger works with journalists and activists on many continents to help them understand and defend against the threats they face, and he is a lead researcher in the online anonymity field. EFF picked him for a Pioneer Award, and Foreign Policy magazine chose him as one of its top 100 global thinkers.
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