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  • #932
Closed (moved) (moved)
Open
Created Feb 27, 2009 by Karsten Loesing@karsten

Bridges report unbelievable numbers of clients

During the evaluation of extra-info documents published by bridges it was found that some bridges report unbelievable numbers of clients. As an example, two subsequently published extra-info documents of the same bridge look are as follows (* denotes removed parts). Here, the first extra-info document is the first such document that was published by this bridge.

extra-info * published 2008-10-28 17:20:32 geoip-start-time 2008-10-25 23:07:16 geoip-client-origins de=936,us=704,cn=664,it=288,fr=208,ru=192,gb=144,*

extra-info * published 2008-10-29 09:20:33 geoip-start-time 2008-10-27 09:07:01 geoip-client-origins ae=8,bg=8,cn=8,cz=8,de=8,dk=8,es=8,hk=8,in=8,it=8,*

The same bridge was running as a relay before 2008-10-28 with the last router descriptor published at around 2008-10-27 14:00:00.

A possible (and even likely) explanation for the high numbers of clients is that these clients contacted the bridge back when it was running as a relay. When being reconfigured to run as a bridge, the bridge did not clear its geoip cache and counted the relay clients as bridge clients. Only when clearing the cache on 2008-10-27 09:07:01, the relay clients were removed from the cache.

A solution to the described problem is that bridges do not include geoip information in their extra-info documents if they have published a router descriptor within the past few days, e.g., 3 days. These 3 (or whatever fits here) days ensure that clients do not know about the bridge as a relay anymore, but only as a bridge. This prevents both overcounting and unwantedly revealing information about relay usage.

There is another phenomenon of a bridge that publishes both router descriptors and bridge descriptors at the same time. In fact, it's not forbidden to set 'PublishServerDescriptor v2,v3,bridge'. However, this defeats the point of counting only bridge clients and including them in extra-info documents. Should this behavior be changed, so that nodes can publish either router descriptors or bridge descriptors, but not both?

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