Measure Hidden Service Rendezvous Path Lengths
We're trying to measure the traffic capacity of the Tor Network, particularly as it relates to hidden services.0
But we don't know how long the average hidden service rendezvous path is:
- Either side can have a 3 or 4 hop connection, due to cannibalization
- Clients can use Tor2Web and have one-hop paths
- Servers can or will be able to use (Rendezvous) Single Onion Services, and have one hop paths
We know it's probably somewhere between 7 and 9 connections / hops, but that's a large range. And it may shrink as more (R)SOS servers come online.
Is there a privacy-preserving way of collecting these statistics? (We'd need to combine stats from clients and hidden services.)
Is it worth doing this as a once-off, or should we (re)design the collection of a number of privacy-preserving stats?