[tor-dev] Tor Project Idea for GSOC 2015

[Paul Syverson]

Hi Gautham,

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 03:53:00PM +0530, Gautham Nekkanti wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>     I am Gautham (icodemachine from IRC and TRAC). I am willing to
> participate in GSoC 2015. I was brainstorming for project ideas and thought
> of this useful project idea.
> 
> I want to put forward a project idea of Simple analytics tool for HIDDEN
> service providers.

Nice idea.

> Although, there are already thousands of
> third-party traffic statistic tools, most of them require javascript and
> just defeats the whole purpose of server anonymity. This project is a
> little similar to Arm, instead it involves in listening how many users are
> connected to our site and parsing it.
> 
> Advanced metrics like IP addresses of visitors, countries, e.t.c. wouldn't
> be available as it is pointless in our case (Since the IPs reflect the IPs
> of exit nodes).

I was going to say that it could still be useful to detect in order to
notice patterns of (mis)behavior from exit relays, also if shared this
could be useful for statistics to help understand the network. The
latter wouldn't be of direct use to the onion service provider but
both would help in general...

But then I realized this reasoning accepts your statement that IPs are
of exit nodes.  Actually, for onion services all connections are
outbound, so IPs are only of guard nodes for the onionsite.

But this little mistake also made me think that sharing of the other
statistics would still be useful for the understanding use of onion
services. This would have to be only if the onionsite operator wanted
to share and should be configured with consideration for privacy and
security. There is existing project work looking at supporting
voluntary indexing by onion services and this could be a nice
complement to that. Playing up that aspect could perhaps up the
interest of potential mentors.

Cool idea in any case,
Paul

> So, it basically displays the number of visitors and a few
> other metrics. Historic data will be presented graphically. The data will
> be accessible through a localhost website and Historic data would be stored
> in a local database. Although, it is not nearly as advanced as other
> statistic tools, it would still be an essential tool for Hidden service
> providers to analyze their traffic figures. How would it be? Please share
> your views.
> 
> Thanks,
> Gautham