DeepSec Video: Measuring the TOR Network

René Pfeiffer/ February 13, 2016/ Conference, Internet, Security

A lot of people use TOR for protecting themselves and others. Fortunately the TOR network is almost all around us. But what does it do? How can you get access to metrics?

TOR is an anonymisation network and by design doesn’t know anything about its users. However, the question about the structure of the user base often arises. Some people are just interested in the size of the network while others want details about the diversity of its users and relays. Furthermore, TOR is used as a circumvention tool. It is interesting to automatically detect censorship events and to see how the number of users changes in those countries.

TOR’s measurement team tries to give answer to those (and more) questions.

At DeepSec 2015 Jens Kubieziel explained the collection of different data and how measurement is done inside the network. He talked about some of the challenges the measurement team has faced and what results it delivers. TOR has currently more than 30 different measurement tools. The talk introduces you to some of them and show what you can do to profit from them.