Hello people,
for the past few months we've been working on getting better statistics for hidden services [0].
The questions we are trying to answer are "Approximately how many hidden services are there?" and "Approximately how much traffic of the Tor network is going to hidden services?".
We can answer these questions by collecting statistics from Tor relays: specifically, from hidden service directories (HSDirs) and rendezvous points. In our design, these relays first obfuscate the statistics before publishing them, so that the numbers themselves are not entirely precise [1]. We specify how exactly these statistics are collected in proposal 238-hs-relay-stats.txt [2].
We have also developed a Tor branch [3] implementing that proposal that people can run on their relays to start collecting hidden service statistics. The corresponding trac ticket is #13192 if you want to follow the developer discussion [4].
Our plan is that in approximately a week we will ask volunteers to run the branch. Then in a month from now we will use those stats to write a blog post about the approximate size of Tor hidden services network and the approximate traffic it's pushing.
Till then please review our design and code and provide us with feedback :)
Thanks!
George Kadianakis Karsten Loesing Aaron Johnson David Goulet
[0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorR https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-October/007642.html
[1]: see threads for discussion: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007816.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December/007928.html
[2]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/asn/torspec.git/tree/proposals/238-hs-rel...
[3]: https://gitweb.torproject.org/karsten/tor.git/log/?h=task-13192-5