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[tor-commits] [tech-reports/master] Add adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards blog post.
commit b1f18355f738b64a5ac56e171f10694365914114
Author: Karsten Loesing <karsten.loesing@xxxxxxx>
Date: Thu Aug 30 10:22:08 2012 +0200
Add adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards blog post.
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+adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards.pdf
+adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards-2010-09-19.pdf
+
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diff --git a/2010/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards.bib b/2010/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards.bib
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+@inproceedings{ccs10-scheduling,
+ title = {An Improved Algorithm for {T}or Circuit Scheduling},
+ author = {Can Tang and Ian Goldberg},
+ booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer and
+ Communications Security, CCS 2010, Chicago, Illinois, USA, October
+ 4--8, 2010},
+ year = {2010},
+ editor = {Angelos D. Keromytis and Vitaly Shmatikov},
+ publisher = {ACM},
+}
+
+@inproceedings{timing-esorics10,
+ author = {Sambuddho Chakravarty and Angelos Stavrou and Angelos D.
+ Keromytis},
+ title = {Traffic analysis against low-latency anonymity networks using
+ available bandwidth estimation},
+ booktitle = {Proceedings of the 15th European conference on Research in
+ computer security},
+ series = {ESORICS'10},
+ year = {2010},
+ pages = {249--267},
+ publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
+ address = {Berlin, Heidelberg},
+}
+
diff --git a/2010/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards.tex b/2010/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards.tex
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+\documentclass{tortechrep}
+\usepackage{graphicx}
+\begin{document}
+
+\author{Roger Dingledine}
+\contact{arma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx}
+\reportid{2010-09-001}
+\date{September 19, 2010}
+\title{Adaptive throttling of Tor clients by entry guards}
+\maketitle
+
+\begin{abstract}
+Looking for a paper topic (or a thesis topic)? Here's a Tor research area
+that needs more attention.
+The short version is: if we prevent the really loud users from using too
+much of the Tor network, how much can it help?
+
+We've instrumented Tor's entry relays so they can rate-limit connections
+from users, and we've instrumented the directory authorities so they can
+change the rate-limiting parameters globally across the network.
+Which parameter values improve performance for the Tor network as a whole?
+How should relays adapt their rate-limiting parameters based on their
+capacity and based on the network load they see, and what rate-limiting
+algorithms will work best?
+
+We'd love to work with you to help answer these questions.
+\end{abstract}
+
+One of the reasons why Tor is slow is that some people use it for
+file-sharing or other high-volume transfers.
+That means if you want to get your instant message cell through, it
+sometimes needs to wait in line behind a pile of other cells---leading to
+high latency and, maybe even worse, highly variable latency.
+
+One way to improve the situation is Can and Goldberg's ``An Improved
+Algorithm for Tor Circuit Scheduling''~\cite{ccs10-scheduling}, which was
+integrated into Tor as of 0.2.2.11-alpha.
+The idea is to track how many cells the relay has handled for each circuit
+lately, and give priority to cells from quieter circuits.
+
+But while that puts some cells in front of others, it can only work so
+many miracles: if many cells have been placed in front of your cell it
+still has to wait, and the more overall load there is in the network, the
+more often that will happen.
+
+Which leads to the research problem: if we work to keep the really loud
+flows off the network in the first place, how much can it help?
+
+Tor 0.2.2.15-alpha lets you set the PerConnBWRate and PerConnBWBurst
+config options in your relay, to use token buckets%
+\footnote{\url{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token\_bucket}} to rate limit
+connections from non-relays.
+Tor 0.2.2.16-alpha added the capability for the directory authorities to
+broadcast network-wide token bucket parameters, so we can change how much
+throttling there is and then observe the results on the network.
+
+So the first question is to model how this should work to improve
+performance at a single entry guard.
+Say we do periodic performance tests fetching files of size 50KB, 1MB, and
+5MB using that relay as our first hop, and say the relay sets
+PerConnBWRate to 5KB/s and PerConnBWBurst to 2MB.
+That is, bursts of up to 2 megabytes on the connection are unthrottled,
+but after that it's squeezed to a long-term average of 5 kilobytes per
+second, until the flow lets up at which point the allowed burst slowly
+builds back up to 2MB.
+We would expect the 5MB tests to show horrible performance, since they'll
+need at least $3000/5=600$ seconds to fetch the last 3MB of the file.
+We would expect the 50KB and 1MB tests to look \emph{better}, though: if
+we're squeezing out the really big flows, there's more space for what's
+left.
+
+We actually performed this experiment, using Sebastian's relay fluxe3.
+You can see his performance graphs over time in
+Figure~\ref{fig:torperf-experiment3}.
+The black dots are individual fetches, the y axis is how many seconds it
+took to fetch the file, and the x axis is time (the green-shaded areas are
+when the feature is turned on).
+Don't pay too much attention to the blue smoothing line; it's probably not
+matching the actual distribution well.
+
+\begin{figure}
+\centering
+\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{1750-torperf-experiment3.png}
+\caption{Influence of PerConnBW* settings on user-perceived Tor
+performance over time}
+\label{fig:torperf-experiment3}
+\end{figure}
+
+Figure~\ref{fig:torperf-experiment-ecdf2} has the cumulative distribution
+functions for the same data.
+The performance gets significantly better both for the 50KB and the 1MB
+downloads, and as expected gets significantly worse for the 5MB downloads.
+
+\begin{figure}
+\centering
+\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{1750-torperf-experiment-ecdf2.png}
+\caption{Empirical cumulative distribution functions of the influence of
+PerConnBW* settings on user-perceived Tor performance}
+\label{fig:torperf-experiment-ecdf2}
+\end{figure}
+
+% Here's the raw data: 50kb, 1mb, 5mb. See the Torperf howto for help interpreting it.
+%% As of August 30, the links http://siv.sunet.se/sebastian/[50kb.data,
+%% 1mb.data,5mb.data] don't work anymore.
+
+So far so good; we've done the proof of concept, and now we need a
+research group to step in, make it rigorous, and help tackle the real
+research questions.
+
+The next question is: how well does this trick work under various
+conditions?
+It would seem that if there's plenty of spare bandwidth on the relay, it
+should have little effect.
+If we choose parameters that are too lenient, it also would have little
+effect.
+But choosing parameters that are too low will hurt normal web browsing
+users too.
+Are there rate and burst values that would cleanly separate web browsers
+from bulk downloaders?
+Will certain relays (that is, relays with certain characteristics) provide
+clearer performance improvements than others?
+
+How often is it the case, for various relay capacities and various user
+loads, that at least one connection is being throttled?
+The CDFs appear to show improved performance spread out pretty evenly
+relative to download time.
+What statistics should we make relays track over time so we can get a
+better intuition about the load they're really seeing?
+
+Now is where it gets tricky.
+If we're only thinking about one relay turning on this feature in a
+vacuum, then if that relay has enough capacity to handle all its flows, it
+should---no sense slowing down \emph{anybody} if you can handle all the
+traffic.
+But instead think of the entire Tor network as a system: your Tor requests
+might also slow down because a loud Tor flow entered at some other relay
+and is colliding with yours somewhere along the path.
+So there's a reason to squeeze incoming connections even if you have
+enough capacity to handle them: to reduce the effects of bottlenecks
+elsewhere in the system.
+If all relays squeeze client connections, what changes in the performance
+test results do we expect to see for various rate limiting parameter
+values?
+
+We have the capability of doing network-wide experiments to validate your
+theory, by putting the rate and burst in the hourly networkstatus
+consensus and letting relays pick it up from there.
+That is, you can modify the global network-wide parameters and then
+observe the effects in the network.
+Note that the experiment will be complicated by the fact that only relays
+running a sufficiently recent version of Tor will honor the parameters;
+that fraction should increase significantly when Tor 0.2.2.x becomes the
+new stable release (sometime in late 2010).
+
+And finally, once you have a good intuition about how throttling flows at
+point X affects flow performance at point Y, we get to the really hard
+research questions.
+It's probably the case that no fixed network-wide rate limiting parameters
+are going to provide optimal behavior: the parameters ought to be a
+function of the load patterns on the network and of the capacity of the
+given relay.
+Should relays track the flows they've seen recently and adapt their
+throttling parameters over time?
+Is there some flow distribution that relays can learn the parameters of,
+such that we e.g.\ throttle the loudest 10\% of flows?
+Can we approximate optimal behavior when relays base their parameters on
+only the local behavior they see, or do we need a more global view of the
+system to choose good parameters?
+And what does ``optimal'' mean here anyway?
+Or said another way, how much flexibility do we have to define optimal, or
+do the facts here railroad us into prefering certain definitions?
+
+What are the anonymity implications of letting the behavior of user A
+influence the performance of user B, in the local-view case or the
+global-view case?
+We could imagine active attacks that aim to influence the parameters; can
+those impact anonymity?
+
+As a nice side effect, this feature may provide a defense against
+Sambuddho's bandwidth-based link congestion attack~\cite{timing-esorics10},
+which relies on a sustained high-volume flow---if the attack ever gets
+precise enough that we can try out our defense and compare.
+
+Here are some other constraints to keep in mind:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+\item We need the Burst to be big enough to handle directory fetches (up
+to a megabyte or two), or things will get really ugly because clients will
+get slowed down while bootstrapping.
+
+\item Mike's bandwidth authority%
+\footnote{\url{https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torflow-node-capacity-integrity-and-reliability-measurements-hotpets}}
+measurement scripts%
+\footnote{\url{https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/blob/HEAD:/NetworkScanners/BwAuthority/README.BwAuthorities}}
+send traffic over relays to discover their actual capacity relative to
+their advertised capacity.
+The larger the claimed capacity, the more they send---up to several
+megabytes for the fast relays.
+If relays throttle these bandwidth tests, the directory authorities will
+assign less traffic to them, making them appear to provide better
+performance when in fact they're just being less useful to the network.
+This is an example of a case where it would be easy to misinterpret your
+results if you don't understand the rest of the Tor system.
+A short-term workaround would be to turn the bandwidth authority Tors into
+relays so they don't get throttled.
+
+\item You'll want to do experiments on an established relay with the Guard
+flag, or it probably won't see many client connections except for clients
+fetching directory updates.
+Note that the longer a relay has had the Guard flag, the more users it
+will have attracted; but after a month this effect falls off.
+
+\item Thinking from an economic perspective, it may turn out that the
+performance for a given user doesn't actually get better if we throttle
+the high-volume users, yet we've still improved things.
+That is, if the available capacity of the Tor network improves and thus it
+is supporting more users, we've made a better Tor network even if we
+didn't make it faster for individual users.
+Fortunately, this feedback effect shouldn't happen for short-term
+experiments; but it's something to keep in mind for the long term.
+
+\item It sure would be nice if whatever rate limiting algorithm you
+recommend is efficient to calculate and update over time.
+Some relays are seeing tens of thousands of users, and can't afford much
+processing time on each.
+\end{itemize}
+
+\bibliography{adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards}
+
+\end{document}
+
diff --git a/2010/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards/tortechrep.cls b/2010/adaptive-throttling-tor-clients-entry-guards/tortechrep.cls
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