Re: [tor-dev] Starting work on hidden services

Hi Qingping, thanks for the help! Answer below:

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:44 AM, Qingping Hou <dave2008713@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If you decided to work on profiling hidden service, I would suggest you take a
look at chutney[1] and shadow[2]. Torperf is not under active maintenance
anymore and it can be easily replaced by chutney.

Thanks for the pointers. I'm still not very clear on what each of shadow, chutney, experimentor, torperf or even oprofile should be used for. I'm guessing chutney/oprofile (maybe toperf, originally, too?) are more useful for profiling processes, with less control over what happens in the network, and shadow/experimentor are more useful for network-level simulation. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

A fully automated hidden service profiling tool will be very handy. As the
community is currently designing next generation hidden service protocol, such
tool will help developers evaluate different designs and implementations.

Great! Do you know what kinds of things are most useful to measure first? Is it more useful at this point to:

1. measure time spent on functions within a process, to see if there's anything taking up too much time, for example, at the hidden service's OP during the handshake; or

2. simulate load on a hidden service and see how request response time climbs with number of clients, etc.?

Thanks!

Cheers,
Helder

[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/chutney.git
[2] http://shadow.github.io/

On 03/21/2014 03:05 PM, Helder Ribeiro wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm an undergraduate student at University of Campinas, in Brazil, starting
> now I'll be working all year, >=20h/week on research about and improvements
> to tor hidden services under the supervision of Prof. Diego F. Aranha.
>
> I'm generally very inexperienced both with Tor (I've been reading papers
> and specs, but don't know my way around the source yet) and with
> programming C in the real world (contrived class projects are basically all
> I've done), so there will be a lot to ramp up to.
>
> Given the above time and experience constraints, I want to 1. do something
> that is not urgent/blocking; 2. stay as far away as possible from
> security-sensitive code, and 3. bite off something that is doable,
> including ramp-up, within a semester.
>
> Going through the "Hidden Services need some love" blog post, I found the
> item "Analyze Hidden Service Circuit Establishment Timing With Torperf"
> fitting. From reading the tickets, it seems like I would need to add some
> instrumentation (#3459) and then do the measurements.
>
> Some questions:
>
> - Is there anything else that would fit the above constraints that you need
> done more? I'm starting to write the grant proposal (submission is in 2
> weeks) and I can still change it to anything else. (I'll dedicate the same
> amount of time to the project this year regardless of having the grant
> approved.)
>
> - Who should I report to?
>
> - Assuming I stick to the timing analysis above, are there any specific
> questions that you would like the analysis to answer?
>
> Thanks a lot!
>
> Cheers,
> Helder
>
>
>

> _______________________________________________
> tor-dev mailing list
> tor-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
>

_______________________________________________
tor-dev mailing list
tor-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev