Hi Robin,
Sorry it's taken a while for someone to respond to your email. Many of us have been on leave from the start of December until this week.
Please see my response below:
On 22 Dec 2017, at 11:23, Robin Descamps robin.descamps@outlook.com wrote:
Hello,
I already sent this message to the metrics team, but they advice me to address it to the dev team, which seem to be more relevant.
I realise this year a master thesis, in the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, about measuring the utility brought to the Tor network diversity by adding a new relay, according to its configuration. I added to this message my master thesis plan, as well as a poster that presents a summary of the key elements.
May I ask you advices/feedback about this master thesis plan? Since I would like this project to bring a real contribution to the Tor development, I want to make sure that all the steps I will perform are useful and/or worth it.
The master thesis plan: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XEOSS29owavKJ_cJJAVaPiJe34Ez6XXx The poster: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BlF2U-Kexyz6ihVSqvsVHv4PUsvXATc4
Have you considered relay bandwidth capacity, measured bandwidth, consensus weight, or bandwidth authorities in your plan?
When using the Tor path selection algorithm, relay consensus weight has a big impact on the paths selected by clients.
At the moment, relay consensus weight is a function of relay bandwidth capacity, and geographic location. For a map of consensus weights, see "Consensus Weight versus Bandwidth" on:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#map
Have you considered relay operators or relay families? In particular, operators that could perform end-to-end correlation?
https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/
Have you considered the relay's Operating System? Are you aware that the Tor network has historically been a Linux monoculture, and 90% of relays still run Linux?
https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/ https://torbsd.github.io/blog.html
Have you considered the Tor version that the relay is running?
https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/
Recently, someone created a website that gave badges for different kinds of relay diversity. But I can't remember what it was called.
I've also cc'd nusenu, who has done some work in this area.
T
-- Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)
teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B ricochet:ekmygaiu4rzgsk6n xmpp: teor at torproject dot org ------------------------------------------------------------------------