[tor-relays] ExoneraTor results may be incomplete between April 25 and 30, 2019 and during other periods

[Karsten Loesing]

Hello relay operators,

it turns out that our exit scanner had an issue between April 25 and 29,
2019 and that ExoneraTor results may be incomplete during this time.

Some context, taken from the ExoneraTor page:

https://metrics.torproject.org/exonerator.html

"The ExoneraTor service maintains a database of IP addresses that have
been part of the Tor network. It answers the question whether there was
a Tor relay running on a given IP address on a given date. ExoneraTor
may store more than one IP address per relay if relays use a different
IP address for exiting to the Internet than for registering in the Tor
network, and it stores whether a relay permitted transit of Tor traffic
to the open Internet at that time."

Now, if somebody looks up their exit IP address during the time between
April 25 and 29, 2019, their relay won't be listed in the results. It
will still be included with the IP address that it used for registering
at the directory authorities, but not with its exit IP address.

I looked through the archive of exit lists and found similar downtimes
of 18 hours or longer which would have the same effect:

Gap of  19 hours between 2011-09-10T00:05:00 and 2011-09-10T19:28:46.
Gap of  23 hours between 2011-12-21T01:21:19 and 2011-12-22T00:23:36.
Gap of 111 hours between 2012-02-07T02:33:16 and 2012-02-11T18:07:47.
Gap of  26 hours between 2013-03-07T15:16:50 and 2013-03-08T17:17:55.
Gap of 156 hours between 2013-03-14T09:29:25 and 2013-03-20T22:03:41.
Gap of  19 hours between 2015-10-09T14:13:37 and 2015-10-10T09:57:26.
Gap of  18 hours between 2018-02-02T18:27:54 and 2018-02-03T13:06:09.
Gap of 122 hours between 2019-04-25T13:13:19 and 2019-04-30T15:40:21.
Gap of  21 hours between 2019-05-25T19:04:43 and 2019-05-26T16:09:23.

We're working on adding a notice to ExoneraTor results in case a lookup
falls into one of these periods, but that will take us some time.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31071

Sorry for any confusions caused by this!

All the best,
Karsten

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