[tor-dev] Starting work on hidden services

[Helder Ribeiro]

Hi Qingping, thanks for the help! Answer below:


On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:44 AM, Qingping Hou <dave2008713 at gmail.com> 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
> >
> >
> >
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> > tor-dev at lists.torproject.org
> > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
> >
>
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