[tor-bugs] #7520 [BridgeDB]: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB

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#7520: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB
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 Reporter:  aagbsn       |          Owner:     
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:     
Component:  BridgeDB     |        Version:     
 Keywords:  SponsorL     |         Parent:     
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:     
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Comment(by aagbsn):

 Ah, so one thing that Proximax does is evaluate users of the system by a
 metric "user-hours", referred to as yield, in order to figure out how to
 allocate a sparse set of bridges effectively.

 BridgeDB already obtains the extra-info field bridge-ips for each bridge,
 which consists of approximate user-counts per country.
 BridgeDB also learns which bridges are blocked by parsing a file, however,
 we don't yet produce this list of blocked bridges. Also, the file format
 does not include a timestamp field, and blocking events are grouped into a
 single line. If we want to extrapolate bridge availability we will
 probably want a more descriptive format, and BridgeDB should learn to
 track some sort of per-country availabile-uptime metric.

 Alternately, we could extract yield entirely from the bridge-ips line by
 tracking users seen over time. This could be manipulated by a dishonest
 bridge operator, or an attacker who generates traffic to known bridges to
 boost their ranking and obtain more trust in this system.

 I'm not sure what we can do about this. Are there other ways to estimate
 bridge usage without just trusting the bridge self-reporting?

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7520#comment:5>
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