Mapping the Tor Network's Geographic Bias

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Privacy is a beautiful thing.

But trying to run a globally secure, decentralized anonymity network when almost all your speed test nodes are sitting comfy inside high-speed European and American datacenters is just pure delusion.

We end up with a network that looks blazing fast on paper to a developer in Frankfurt, while being a total, lagging nightmare for real users in Johannesburg, Mumbai, or Singapore. T_T

The issue isnt the onion routing protocol itself.

Tor Relay Performance Datasets

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 06:36:18 +0000

Analyzing performance characteristics of anonymity networks is notoriously difficult. In the Tor network, bandwidth measurements are traditionally concentrated within a few core directory authorities or testing agents.

Because these measurement nodes are mostly located inside North American and European datacenters, the resulting performance metrics suffer from severe geographical bias.

If you are a privacy researcher trying to analyze how well Tor relays perform in the Global South or the APAC region, existing public datasets are sparse, unreliable, and heavily skewed.

Research on Daniel 'f0o' Preussker

Mapping the Tor Network's Geographic Bias

Tor Relay Performance Datasets