Gather empirical data on AES/RSA operations performed by typical relays or bridges
At the Florence hackfest I was asked for the typical number of AES/RSA operations performed by a relay or bridge, say, per day. This information is relevant, e.g., for designing the hardware capabilities of a Torouter device.
Here's my plan to find out:
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We can easily derive the number of AES operations by looking at the total traffic pushed by relays and bridges. Extra-info descriptors contain bandwidth histories that we could use here. If we assume 1 AES operation per 16 written or read bytes, we should be quite close to reality.
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Nick suggested to send a USR1 signal to a tor process to write lines like this to their log (this line comes from a client):
Jul 10 18:31:22.904 [info] PK operations: 0 directory objects signed, 0 directory objects verified, 0 routerdescs signed, 2968 routerdescs verified, 216 onionskins encrypted, 0 onionskins decrypted, 30 client-side TLS handshakes, 0 server-side TLS handshakes, 0 rendezvous client operations, 0 rendezvous middle operations, 0 rendezvous server operations.
We could ask a few friendly relay and bridge operators on tor-talk to tell us the number of encrypted and decrypted onionskins together with the fingerprint. We can then look at the uptime of that relay or bridge in the descriptor archives and compute the average number of operations per day.
Is there an easier way to find out how many AES/RSA operations a relay or bridge does per day?