[tor-talk] Is there a known tool/script for analyzing the Tor consensus files?

Karsten Loesing karsten at torproject.org
Thu Aug 14 05:21:21 UTC 2014


On 14/08/14 04:34, Griffin Boyce wrote:
> Hey Virgil,
> 
>   The answer depends on what you'd like to do with consensus files. 
> There was (is?) a GSoC project by Daniel Marti in furtherance of
> proposal 140 [2][1], but that's probably not what you're looking for.
> 
>   There's also a script by Moritz Bartl that analyzes consensus files
> and turns them into a KML[3]
> 
>   I might be able to give you a better answer if you can give relevant
> details.

Indeed, there are many tools that analyze consensus files.  The
CollecTor website lists a few applications:

https://collector.torproject.org/#references

If you want to write your own tool to analyze consensus files, take a
look at the available descriptor-parsing libraries:

https://collector.torproject.org/#libraries

Also feel free to search the metrics-tasks Git repo for examples:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-tasks.git

>   Also, AFAIK, collecTor is just the website [4].

CollecTor has "raw" collected Tor descriptors (including consensuses),
Metrics [5] has aggregate statistics based on these descriptors.  Or,
CollecTor is for machines, Metrics is for humans.

> [1]
> https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob_plain/refs/heads/master:/proposals/140-consensus-diffs.txt
> 
> [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-May/006792.html
> [2b] https://github.com/mvdan/tor
> [3] https://github.com/moba/tormap
> [4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-June/006942.html
> 
> 
> On 2014-08-13 21:01, Virgil Griffith wrote:
>> And just to be pedantically clear, the data on metrics.torproject.org is
>> computed from the collecTor historical consensus files?

Yes.

>> On Wednesday, August 13, 2014, Virgil Griffith <i at virgil.gr> wrote:
>>
>>> Or, if I were to dream, to highlight the differences between two Tor
>>> consensus files?

This really depends on what differences you're interested in and how you
want them to be highlighted.

All the best,
Karsten

[5] https://metrics.torproject.org/



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