[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

Re: [tor-bugs] #6003 [Analysis]: Quantitative user studies of how people use Tor

#6003: Quantitative user studies of how people use Tor
----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  phobos    |          Owner:                             
     Type:  project   |         Status:  new                        
 Priority:  normal    |      Milestone:  Sponsor Z: November 1, 2013
Component:  Analysis  |        Version:                             
 Keywords:            |         Parent:                             
   Points:            |   Actualpoints:                             
----------------------+-----------------------------------------------------
Changes (by karsten):

  * component:  Metrics Website => Analysis


Comment:

 Interesting idea.  I agree that we should think about safe ways to do it,
 rather than letting others do it unsafely.  Thinking aloud here:

 I could image that exit nodes report either of the two following
 statistics to the directory authorities:

  1. top-10/20/50 domain names resolved in the last 24 hours;
  2. top-10/20/50 IP addresses exited to in the last 24 hours.

 I don't know the details of domain name resolution in Tor, but I think 1
 isn't impossible to implement, and it would answer your question better
 than 2.  For either statistic, Tor would only give out the top 10/20/50
 results, round them up to multiples of some number, aggregate over 24
 hours, etc.  There could also be a threshold below which the exit node
 doesn't report any specific results and just reports "other" domain names
 or IP addresses.

 So, I think we could come up with parameters to protect users' privacy
 enough here (in particular if we can convince other researchers to use our
 data instead of doing their let's-log-everything approach).  The exit
 nodes would report these statistics in their extra-info descriptors to the
 directory authorities where we collect them, make them public to anyone,
 and analyze them.  As part of this analysis we could also extrapolate
 numbers to compensate for missing statistics and present an overall
 top-100 list for a given day, week, month, or year.

 Is this very roughly what you had in mind?  If so, we should move the
 discussion to the tor-dev mailing list for added fun.

 (Moving this ticket to the Analysis component for the same reason as
 #6002.)

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6003#comment:2>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online
_______________________________________________
tor-bugs mailing list
tor-bugs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-bugs