[tor-dev] Hashring understanding

[George Kadianakis]

Spencer <spencerone at openmailbox.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
>> 
>> George Kadianakis:
>> Indeed. [The randomly selected guards] > are saved in the state file. Check:
>> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-February/010355.html
>> also see here for another explanation of 
>> how parts of it work:
>> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-June/007042.html
>>
>
> Besides these, where is the most information on guards and selection/control.
>

Here are some general guard resources that you might enjoy:
     https://blog.torproject.org/blog/improving-tors-anonymity-changing-guard-parameters
     https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/236-single-guard-node.txt
Especially Roger's blog post should contain enough resources to keep you fed.

Unfortunately, there are not many resources about how Tor is picking
guards. The source code and the emails above are your best bet.  We hope that
with proposal 259 we will formalize this part of Tor further and make it easier
to analyze and reason about.

> I am interested in overstanding the information in the 'state' file.
>

See here for some explanations: 
    https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/doc/state-contents.txt

The rest you will have to read the code to learn unfortunately :)

If you learn more, feel free to update doc/state-contents.txt with your
knowledge, so that future generations can also learn.

> Also note that your explanations are always very detailed and very clear; thank you (:
>

Thanks!