Re: Question about the real traffic pattern to Tor nodes

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2005 at 09:41:54PM +0800, Stone wrote:
>      But I wonder that is the traffic pattern to Tor nodes or those in
> low-latency system the same as that in high-latency anonymous system
> such as Mixmaster. I think this result is helpful when analyzing the
> properties of a mix( e.g. average time delayed before flushing, the
> probability of n-1 attack,etc).  So Has anyone made efforts to prove
> the traffic pattern in the Tor networks? Is the traffic pattern the
> same as is examined in the low-latency network? Or can anyone help
> collect some real input to examine it?  Thank you!

I would guess the traffic pattern is very different. They use email or
other block messages, and we use TCP streams. Note that Tor doesn't mix,
batch, etc, other than the coincidental mixing that happens from our
round-robin approach for reading from the network.

An actual study here is complicated by the fact that, at least in the
US, the laws about looking at other peoples' traffic are very fuzzy.
See http://tor.eff.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html for a few more details.

--Roger