[tor-dev] Counting HS descriptor uploads

David Goulet dgoulet at torproject.org
Tue Aug 9 13:01:10 UTC 2022


On 28 Jun (13:27:03), Michael Rogers wrote:
> Hi,

Better late than never I guess :S...

> 
> The Briar team is working on a new app that uses Tor hidden services, and
> we're trying to work out when the server publishing a hidden service should
> consider the service to be reachable by clients.
> 
> We've tried counting HS descriptor uploads via control port events, but we
> found that when republishing a hidden service that has been published
> before, the number of descriptor uploads seems to vary.
> 
> When republishing a hidden service, is it guaranteed that at least one copy
> of the descriptor will be uploaded? Or are there circumstances where Tor
> might decide that enough copies were previously uploaded, and still contain
> up-to-date information about introduction points etc, so no new copies need
> to be uploaded?

Descriptor upload can be quite chaotic and unpredictable. Reason is that there
are various cases that can make a service regenerate the descriptors and thus
republish them.

But, in all these cases, the descriptor will change as in for the "version"
but might not change the intro points information for instance. Such case
would be that the HSDir hashring changed and the service noticed so it would
immediately upload the existing descriptor(s).

Sometimes, 1 introduction points disappears and so a new one is picked up and
a re-upload is done.

And on and on, there are really various cases that can change it.

Not sure I'm fully answering the question but if not, let me know.

Cheers!
David

-- 
Fqe19T7kkqIztpNhCgmAQyHHCgY/ye8vvtNfYt0mb4s=
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