[tor-talk] DOJ's Tor traffic estimates - reference?

[Andrew Lewman]

On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 05:40:51AM -0400, griffin at cryptolab.net wrote 0.4K bytes in 0 lines about:
:   Is there a good reference for the assertion by DOJ that 3% of Tor's
: traffic is "bad"/used for piracy/etc?  This has been referenced in a few
: talks, but was just wondering if this is written anywhere that can be easily
: referenced.

There was an unpublished study in Nevada by some grad students who setup
a few malware defense appliances on the end of a tor exit relay. They
found 3% of the traffic passing through their exit relay was tagged as
malware, by however the appliance was configured to determine malware
or not.

They never published their research because they either couldn't get
ethics board clearance at their university and/or because of the Univ. of
Colorado exit relay issue at PETS.

I read a draft of the paper, which was subsequently pulled from
publication. I've talked to a few organization who allow Tor exits, but
track good/bad traffic (by their definition) who say 3% sounds high from
what they have seen. None of these orgs will go on the record, but they
are some of the largest social network and ecommerce sites in the world.

-- 
Andrew
pgp 0x6B4D6475