[tor-talk] Exit node stats collection?

[Roman Mamedov]

Hello,

With the influx of "popularity" that Tor now sees, we need a way to figure out
who/what are all these new "users" and what are they actually doing.

Maybe this has been proposed or considered before, but...

Why not make all exit nodes collect e.g. stats about top 10 most actively
requested destination IP addresses+ports for the past hour, both by new
outgoing connections and by amount of data transferred; then send this to a
central service run by the Tor project. In there these stats would be
immediately aggregated, so that there is no way to tell which node is
connecting to what, and only the top most popular exit IPs+ports across the
whole of the Tor network remain known. Maybe as well make this stats
collection and reporting optional or even disabled by default.

Is there really any harm to anonymity of legitimate users (i.e. not to a
multiple-thousand-of-connections botnet) or to safety of exit node
operators from implementing something like this?

-- 
With respect,
Roman
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