Re: [Help-gnunet] Building a new censorship circumvention tool: what do we need to know?

[Christian Grothoff]

On 02/22/2017 12:04 PM, Ivan Vilata-i-Balaguer wrote:
> Christian Grothoff (2017-02-21 13:43:56 +0100) wrote:
> 
>> On 02/21/2017 11:04 AM, Ivan Vilata-i-Balaguer wrote:
>>>>>   7. The system is amenable to privacy-preserving analytics to check its
>>>>>      impact.
>>>> I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but these two sound fraught with
>>>> distractions.  Tor has many people who worked on 7.  We do have ideas
>>>> around network size estimation that might be relevant depending upon
>>>> the scale and network properties.
>>> 6 refers to e.g. not storing/routing plain text but encrypted content
>>> (your own or other's).  7 I guess may be hard for such
>>> privacy-preserving systems, but at the very least having an idea on the
>>> size of the network would be very useful to assess the anonymity it
>>> actually provides.
>>
>> Well, then you should definitively check out this:
>>
>> https://gnunet.org/gnunet-nse-subsystem
>>
>> (Note that size of network and anonymity-set-size may not exactly be the
>> same thing. However, for checking social impact with respect to sponsors
>> and/or getting a first rough handle this ought to suffice.)
> 
> Indeed, thanks!  BTW, do you know about anyone who has run this to
> publish some estimates (academic paper or informal) about the current
> size of the network?

Well, we've not made a release in a while and the installation is
non-trivial, so the GNUnet network is still rather small.  But it
doesn't take a study to figure it out, just run:

$ gnunet-nse
1487784422756253 93.986384 6.554380 2.409871

1487784422756253 Timestamp
93.986384 Current estimate (~94 peers)
 6.554380 LOG2-of-estimate (raw value that was measured)
 2.409871 std-dev of LOG

The result will be updated roughly hourly.


An academic paper about the method itself is here:

http://grothoff.org/christian/rrsize2012.pdf

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