[tor-project] The Akamai slide Alec posted

David Fifield david at bamsoftware.com
Fri May 20 16:55:05 UTC 2016


On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 08:56:06AM -0400, Ian Goldberg wrote:
> Does anyone know where we can get more information about the stats
> behind this slide:
> 
> https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/730773970383982592
> 
> The slide says:
> 
> 1:11,500 non-Tor IPs contained malicious requests
> 1:380 Tor exit nodes contained malicious requests
> 
> The way it's worded, it sounds like they're saying "1/11500 of the
> non-Tor IP addresses we saw sent malicious requests, and 1/380 of the
> Tor exit node IP addresses we saw sent malicious requests", but I'm
> finding that hard to believe, since 1/380 of the Tor exit node IP
> addresses is ~3 IP addresses.  It's unlikely that all malicious Tor
> traffic was confined to 3 exit nodes.  (But interesting if true.)
> 
> Were they perhaps being a little loose and really meant "1/11500 TCP
> connections coming from non-Tor IP addresses, and 1/380 TCP connections
> coming from Tor exit nodes, contained malicious requests"?

There's an actual written report (Sadia Afroz found the link to the
report). The Tor part starts on page 59.

https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-cloud-security-report-q2.pdf#59

Here are the relevant tables. The heading "Global Rank" in Figure 4-2 is
probably supposed to be "Source". The percentages in Figure 4-4 are off
by a factor of 100; i.e. 1/380=0.0026=0.26%.

The first two figures, 4-2 and 4-3, are explicitly in terms of requests.
Figure 4-4 is a ratio between two "traffic" values but the caption
refers to requests.

Global Rank	Legitimate HTTP Requests	Frequency
Non-Tor IPs	534,999,725,930			99.96%
Tor exit nodes	228,436,820			00.04%
Figure 4-2: Of the legitimate HTTP requests, excluding static media
files, less than 1% were from Tor exit notes 

Source		Legitimate HTTP Requests	Frequency
Non-Tor IPs	46,530,841			98.74%
Tor exit nodes	596,042				1.26%
Figure 4-3: Of the malicious HTTP requests, 1.26% were from Tor exit
notes

Source		Ratio Between Malicious & Legitimate Traffic	Frequency
Non-Tor IPs	0.00008697% malicious traffic			~1:11,500
Tor exit nodes	0.00260922% malicious traffic			~1:380
Figure 4-4: Though the traffic levels are much smaller, Tor exit nodes
were much more likely to contain malicious requests


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