BWScanner

BWScanner is a tool for measuring the bandwidth of Tor relays. Its aim is to replace the existing Torflow system.

This project is still under active development and is not ready for active use or production deployment yet.

Installation

BWScanner is not yet compatible with Python 3 due to the `txsocksx ` dependency.

In Debian/Ubuntu systems, you can install Python 2 and other systems requirements running:

sudo apt install python2.7 python2.7-dev

The bandwidth scanner and its dependencies can be installed as follows:

git clone https://github.com/TheTorProject/bwscanner.git
cd bwscanner
python setup.py install

In case your system is using Python 3 by default, you need to run Python 2 explicitely, changing last line by:

python2.7 setup.py install

Running

After installation the bwscan tool should be available in your path. This tool has a number of subcommands for running scans and for aggregating the collected data for use by the bandwidth authorities.

Collecting bandwidth measurements

The --partitions option can be used to split the consensus into subsets of relays which can be scanned on different machines. The results can later be combined during the measurement aggregation step.

bwscan scan

Aggregating scan results

This command will aggregate the data for the latest five completed scans.

bwscan aggregate -n 5

The final aggregation script is not yet integrated with the CLI. It should be called with the path to the directory containing the most recent aggregated data:

python scripts/aggregate.py ~/.config/bwscanner/measurements/1474278776

Development

Unit and integration tests are run automatically for each pull request. The tests must pass before code will be merged. Tox is used to run the tests reproducibly in your development environment.

Tox can be used to create new Python virtual environments with a reproducible state and to run all the tests.

pip install tox
git clone https://github.com/TheTorProject/bwscanner.git
cd bwscanner

The integration tests are run against a local Tor network which is managed by chutney. You can start chutney as follows:

git clone https://git.torproject.org/chutney.git
cd chutney
./chutney stop networks/basic-025
./chutney configure networks/basic-025
./chutney start networks/basic-025
./chutney status networks/basic-025
cd ..

The bandwidth scanner needs to be able to connect to a Tor control port to interact with the network. If using chutney the port 8021 should work. Tests are run by simply calling tox.

cd bwscanner
export CHUTNEY_CONTROL_PORT=8021
tox

Contact

#bwscanner at irc.oftc.net

License

Copyright 2016 Aaron Gibson, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, David Stainton, Copyright 2018 Aaron Gibson, juga, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill under the terms of the GPLv2 license.