[tor-project] scanning for partition in the presumed tor relay mesh network

[dawuud]

> Hello David,
>
> thank you for doing and sharing this.

running active scans is fun.
building longer term solutions is fun.

> Since you mention the design problem of potentially including relays
> that are no longer in consensus: Did you review the list of relays
> failing _ALL_ circuits against the consensus to check if they just went
> offline (or reset their uptime) during the scan? How much time did the
> scan take? How much time is usually between each of these 99 attempts?

No, I did not check if relays in the scan consensus were missing from subsequent consensus files.
I agree it's a good idea to check. The scan with those parameters takes 45 minutes.
The duration of time between circuit build attempts is .25 seconds.

detect_partitions.py --tor-control tcp:127.0.0.1:9051 --log-dir ./ --status-log ./status_log \
--relay-list top100.relays --secret secret --partitions 1 --this-partition 0 \
--build-duration .25 --circuit-timeout 60 --log-chunk-size 1000 --max-concurrency 100

> Can I download your raw scan results (logs with timestamps) somewhere so
> I could check if these 'failed ALL circuits' relays reset their uptime
> or went offline during the scan?

No... but you can run your own scan and obtain the results in minutes.

> Did you also play with teor's scanner?
> https://github.com/teor2345/onion-graph

No.

> I've started a related (but more long-term) thread on tor-dev on
> collecting this kind of data:
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-October/012502.html

Cool. Yes and Peer Flow should be an excellent change for the tor network
since it's a better bandwidth authority system than torflow:

https://petsymposium.org/2017/papers/issue2/paper12-2017-2-source.pdf

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