[tor-reports] SponsorR December 2014 report

[George Kadianakis]

Hello,

here is the December 2014 report for SponsorR:

- In the beginning of December we revised the hidden service
  statistics proposal [0].  We also implemented the statistics in tor
  and after asking for review and feedback from the community we got
  the code merged upstream. The code has since been released as
  tor-0.2.6.2-alpha.

  We then asked volunteers to run our code on their relays. In just a
  few days we had over 70 relays submitting hidden service statistics
  which gave us a data set that could be analyzed.

  Finally, we started the analysis of the data by writing a
  document [1] that details our findings and tries to extrapolate from
  our limited dataset to the whole Tor network.

- We revised the tech report that enumerates the various hidden
  service statistics [2]. It's currently still a draft and will likely
  be improved further in the following months.

- Aaron Johnson started a [tor-dev] thread [3] with some ideas on protocols
  that allow better and more accurate statistics collection while
  preserving the privacy of hidden services.

- David Goulet wrote a post [4] on his technique for benchmarking the
  performance of hidden services. The post includes some interesting
  graphs on the performance of hidden service circuit establishment [5].

- Started work on combining the Shadow simulator with tracing, to
  measure hidden service performance on simulated networks.

[0]: https://gitweb.torproject.org//torspec.git/tree/proposals/238-hs-relay-stats.txt

[1]: https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/extrapolating-hidserv-stats-2015-01-11.pdf

[2]: https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/hidden-service-stats-2015-01-10.pdf

[3]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-January/008086.html

[4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December/007989.html

[5]: https://people.torproject.org/~dgoulet/hs/ip-025.png
     https://people.torproject.org/~dgoulet/hs/rp-025.png