[tor-talk] Tor client version statistics

[Karsten Loesing]

On 1/9/14 11:18 AM, Olivier Cornu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 8:37 PM, Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org>wrote:
> 
>>
>> No, there are no statistics on client versions.  The reason is that
>> clients don't report their version anywhere, in contrast to relays and
>> bridges which report their version in their server descriptors.
>>
> 
> I'm not sure if you guys are just talking about clients version numbers, or
> different client implementations?

Well, there are probably ways to distinguish older clients from newer
clients and alternate client implementations from the official one when
clients connect to relays.  But that isn't something we would use for
statistics.

Best,
Karsten


> Anyway, looking into a 2006 NSA document about Tor [1], one can read (page
> 8) that some client identifying information may be found in the issuer and
> subject portions of X.509 certificates. Is this still the case today?
> The NSA built its own implementation of a Tor client lib (named MJOLNIR),
> which is claimed to play around with these fields as a way to conceal it's
> generating Tor TCP traffic. Yet, in doing so, it seems to advertise to the
> OR that it's not a standard Tor client…
> 
> Aloha.
> ___
> ɹǝıʌıןo
> 
> [1] http://cryptome.org/2013/10/nsa-tor.pdf
>