The team behind the Tor Project has been making good on its goal to provide improved IPv6 support on the Tor network. Here's an update!
In our last article on RIPE Labs we talked about work that took place in 2020 that was related to giving IPv6 support to the Tor network. Tor 0.4.5.1-alpha is the first release that includes all the work we described there. Relays running 0.4.5.1-alpha are the first to report IPv6 bandwidth statistics.
As of 2 December 2020, 54% of the relays on the network run a version of Tor that supports IPv6. Of the 6,852 relays in the network, 3,587 are running version 0.4.4 and 8 relays are running the latest Tor version 0.4.5. From all those, 1,588 are announcing an IPv6 address and port for the OR protocol. 1,587 relays are reachable on IPv6 by the directory authorities. 626 permit exiting to IPv6 targets.
The latest consensus published in November contains:
- 6,538 relays:
- 1,562 of these (36.39% TCW) have an IPv6 ORPort
- 1,067 of these (24.86% TCW) support at least partial IPv6 reachability checks
- 55 of these (1.90% TCW) support full IPv6 reachability checks
- 2,527 "usable guards" and Wgd=0.
- 641 of these (29.73% UGCW) support IPv6 clients.
- 446 of these (21.33% UGCW) support at least partial IPv6 reachability checks.
- 36 of these (2.92% UGCW) support full IPv6 reachability checks.
The IPv6 stats that we are collecting are:
- The number of Tor relays that support IPv6 reachability checks (full versus partial)
- The number of Tor relays that have an IPv6 ORPort
- The number of connections, and consumed bandwidth, using IPv4 and IPv6
- IPv6 bandwidth statistics
Remember that for relays to report IPv6 bandwidth statistics, they would have to set the option ConnDirectionStatistics to 1 and leave the ExtraInfoStatistics option enabled (it is on by default) to be able to report IPv6 bandwidth statistics. This is the relay operators’ decision, since relays are operated by volunteers. We will keep the statistics code in the codebase for when 0.4.5 is released and relays start reporting it.
The Tor Project was a funding recipient of the RIPE NCC Community Projects Fund 2019.
Comments 1
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Thomas Schäfer •
The most recent tor browser alpha still needs a bridge when started in an IPv6-only network. Also the socks-proxy doesn't work here without ipv4.