Spencer spencerone@openmailbox.org writes:
Hi,
George Kadianakis: Indeed. [The randomly selected guards] > are saved in the state file. Check: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-February/010355.html also see here for another explanation of how parts of it work: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-June/007042.html
Besides these, where is the most information on guards and selection/control.
Here are some general guard resources that you might enjoy: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-par... https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/236-single-guard-no... Especially Roger's blog post should contain enough resources to keep you fed.
Unfortunately, there are not many resources about how Tor is picking guards. The source code and the emails above are your best bet. We hope that with proposal 259 we will formalize this part of Tor further and make it easier to analyze and reason about.
I am interested in overstanding the information in the 'state' file.
See here for some explanations: https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/doc/state-contents.txt
The rest you will have to read the code to learn unfortunately :)
If you learn more, feel free to update doc/state-contents.txt with your knowledge, so that future generations can also learn.
Also note that your explanations are always very detailed and very clear; thank you (:
Thanks!