[tor-dev] Anonymous Local Count Statistics Using PCSA - GSoC

[Jaskaran Singh]

Hi Aaron,

These statistics not just tell about the user's country but also keep a
track of unique IP addresses connecting from each country. This is
needed so as to present more realistic stats. If we increment counter on
any IP address instead of unique IP address then the statistics would
also reflect  user(s) connecting again and again. If we don't count
Unique IPs, we would have stats about per country usage rather than per
country users. We could do much better and implement a way(as described
by the OP of thread) that counts unique IPs at the same time preserves
privacy.

And for your second point about hiding the actual counter from
adversary, I agree that this can potentially de-anonymize a client.
An adversary (let's say the government of some small, less populous
country) could try to fingerprint the traffic of it's target(s) and
later correlate it with the data we publish on the metrics site. This
attack could work very well for countries where the Tor users can be
counted on fingers. So, I believe hiding the counter data should also be
implemented along with hiding the IP addresses.

Regards,
--
Jaskaran Veer Singh (jvsg)
jvsg1303 at gmail dot com
PGP 2814 3FB7 A32D 429B 092E 27F0 8AA3 C532 9E1A 6AD8