[tor-bugs] #13195 [Tor]: Collect aggregate stats around hidden service descriptor publishes and fetches

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#13195: Collect aggregate stats around hidden service descriptor publishes and
fetches
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 Reporter:  arma                 |          Owner:
     Type:  task                 |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal               |      Milestone:  Tor: 0.2.???
Component:  Tor                  |        Version:
 Keywords:  SponsorR, tor-relay  |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                       |         Points:
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 How many hidden services are there, total? Is that number going up or
 down? Are there interesting recent trends? Does ahmia's list of hidden
 services represent most of them or few of them?

 We have no idea.

 If each relay that serves as an HSDir fetch track of number of .onion
 addresses they've seen, total number of descriptor publishes they've seen,
 and total number of descriptor fetches they've seen, we'd get closer to
 answering some of these questions.

 There is also a privacy question here: a given HSDir is responsible for a
 given slice of the keyspace, so if indeed hidden services vary widely in
 popularity, then I expect the answers here to vary widely by relay. How
 bad is it to reveal stats that might be used to guess about popularity of
 hidden services? If it is bad, this might be a perfect situation for using
 a tool like PrivEx, to get the network-wide total without revealing per-
 relay contribution to that total.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13195>
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The Tor Project: anonymity online