Tor Metrics Portal: Tools


This page contains a collection of tools that can be used to gather statistics as provided on the data page and to process the resulting files to generate graphs.


Metrics portal software


The graphs on this website are generated using ERNIE, the Enhanced R-based tor Network Intelligence Engine (why ERNIE? because nobody liked BIRT; sorry for misspelling Tor). ERNIE consists of Java code that parses the various input data formats and writes CSV files and R code that processes the CSV files to generate graphs. Of course, ERNIE can be used to generate customized graphs without the need to put them on a website. ERNIE can further import descriptors into a database for further analysis and aggregate descriptors to make tarballs.


Directory-archive script


The directory-archive script consists of a bunch of shell scripts that periodically download relay descriptors, sort them into a directory structure, and compile monthly tarballs. The tarballs are quite similar to the ones provided on the data page, with a few exceptions: the provided tarballs are the result of combining two directory-archive script outputs, splitting v3 votes and v3 consensuses into separate tarballs and replacing all colons in filenames with dashes. The metrics portal software contains similar functionality.


Bridge descriptor sanitizer


The bridge authority Tonga maintains a list of bridges in order to serve bridge addresses and descriptors to its clients. Every half hour, Tonga takes a snapshot of the known bridge descriptors and copies them to byblos for later statistical analysis. As a guiding principle, the Tor project makes all data that it uses for statistical analysis available to the interested public, in order to maximize transparency towards the community. However, the bridge descriptors contain the IP addresses and other contact information of bridges that must not be made public, or the purpose of bridges as non-public entry points into the Tor network would be obsolete. This script takes the half-hourly snapshots as input, removesall possibly sensitive information from the descriptors, and puts out the sanitized bridge descriptors that are safe to be published. The metrics portal software contains similar functionality and will soon make this bridge descriptor sanitizer obsolete.


Torperf


Torperf is a little tool that measures Tor's performance as users experience it. Torperf uses a trivial SOCKS client to download files of various sizes over the Tor network and notes how long substeps take.

This material is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-0959138. Any opinions, finding, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Data on this site is freely available under a CC0 no copyright declaration: To the extent possible under law, the Tor Project has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights in the data. Graphs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.