A Guided Tour through Tor Network Health and Performance

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.

First streamed on 2023-08-17 at Chaos Communications Camp 2023, in Ziegeleipark Mildenberg, Zehdenick, Germany.