Hi all,

I'm an undergraduate student working as a research assistant for the summer. My current task is to figure out a way to measure delay caused by individual nodes (we want to replicate this paper: http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/Tor.pdf). It seems to me that the easiest way of accomplishing this would be to run an exit node and construct a two-hop circuit to it.

OP ------> Node to be measured -------> Exit node

Since the OP and exit node are under my control, I could measure the time it takes for any packets to reach the exit node from the OP. I want to be the only one who can use this exit node so I don't have to worry about getting approval from the school to run an exit node (could be time-consuming).  I realize this is pretty far from any design goals the developers have, but is there some way of running a hidden exit node? One that doesn't appear on any directory server (PublishServerDescriptor 0 might work), but can still be used if you know its IP address? The Tor Control Protocol makes it easy enough to create a custom circuit (discussed here: http://thesprawl.org/memdump/?entry=8), but it won't accept IP addresses for nodes. I can put an IP in exitnodes in the torrc file, but exitnodes doesn't seem to have any effect, even when StrictExitNodes is set.

Thanks

Joel