A Guided Tour through Tor Network Health and Performance
08-17, 20:00–20:45 (Europe/Berlin), Milliways
Language: English

Since the last time, we were all at camp, several significant changes have happened within the Tor network ecosystem, both technically and socially. In this presentation, we will review some exciting recent updates to the Tor network and look into the world of bad relay tracking, general network health observations, and the situation where multiple extensive Denial of Service attacks have caused a slowdown of the overall network performance.

We wish to guide the audience through a number of new technologies that have been added to the network. These innovations include a modern congestion control mechanism, our multi-path circuit feature, Conflux, and a Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism to help against Onion Services attacks. Additionally, we will discuss some upcoming changes to the current C Tor code base and our journey towards a Rust Tor relay implementation as part of our Arti re-implementation of Tor. Finally, in addition to the technology modifications, we also would like to talk about some of the social developments happening with the network, amongst others, a new mechanism for handling incoming technical and social proposals from the greater Tor community.


Content Notes

We will be diving into topics related to anonymity, anti-censorship, network monitoring, distributed systems, Rust, C, and collaboration within a highly distributed community.

Alexander is a hacker based in Copenhagen, Denmark. During the day, he leads The Tor Project's Network Team -- the team responsible for building the software that runs the Tor network and for the client to access the network. He enjoys traveling, reading, and planning the BornHack hacker camp in Denmark. Over the years, Alexander has contributed to numerous free and open source software projects such as Linux distributions, the IRC ecosystem, and the Erlang ecosystem.

Works at Tor with network health.

gus

Community Team Lead @ Tor Project