Into.the.Void.

5 years ago I forked Moritz’s tormap project, updated it a bit and wrote about it. Tormap kept running for years until some changes in googlemaps broke it, not all KMLs were loading as they should. I later on figured out that googlemaps didn’t like that some of the KML files were larger than 3Mb. I didn’t have much time to play with it until recently, so a few days ago I decided to make it work again. I used newer googlemaps v3 API calls and compressed KML (KMZ) files to make it work. Then @iainlearmonth and @nusenu_ suggested making even more changes…

Their first suggestion was to use onionoo instead of parsing consensus on my own and running geoip on it, onionoo already provides that in a nice json output. Their other suggestion was to switch tormap to use OpenStretMap instead of googlemaps mostly because googlemaps block some Tor exit nodes and the tiles didn’t appear on the map when visiting over Tor. Both of these issues are fixed now.

I used leaflet.js and a couple of plugins like leaflet-plugins (for KML parsing) and leaflet-color-markers for the switch to OpenStreetMap. I will admit that using googlemaps APIs was far more convenient for someone without any javascript knowledge like me.

Maybe in the next 5 years I will have time again to implement their other suggestion, creating maps of nodes based on custom searches for relay attributes. Unless someone else wants to implement that, feel free to fork it!

Filed by kargig at 11:56 under Internet,Linux,Networking,Privacy
Tags: googlemaps, javascript, map, Networking, OpenStretMap, OSM, Privacy, python, tor
No Comments | 8,905 views

Some months ago I started playing with the idea of creating a world map that would have every Tor node on it. Obviously I wan’t the first one…I soon discovered Moritz Bartl’s post on the same topic. Luckilly he had his code posted on Github so I could fork it and add features that I wanted. The original python script parsed the consensus and the misrodescriptors, put Tor nodes into some classes and created a KML file with some description on each node.

Some differences
I changed some parts of the python script to better suit my needs.
a. Create a separate kml files for each Tor node class.
b. Add new classes: Bad, Authority and Named.
c. Pay more attention on requesting every external URL over HTTPS.
d. Generate HTML code that displays those KMLs on a Google Maps overlay.
e. Add some small randomization to each nodes’s coordinates so that nodes in the same city don’t overlap.

You can find a complete changelog at kargig/tormap GitHub repo.

And here’s the outcome: World city map of Tor nodes at https://tormap.void.gr/
One of my main goals was to have selectable classes of nodes that will appear on the map.

To produce the map overlay, a cron script runs every hour, which is also the period it takes for Tor Authority nodes to produce a new consensus, and creates some static files which are then served by nginx.

I’m not a web developer/designer and I don’t really know any javascript. So please, feel free to fork my code and make it look better, run faster and add your own features. I’ll happily accept patches/pull requests!

Extras
On kargig/tormap repo you will also find a handy script, ‘runme.sh’, that downloads all necessary files that need to be parsed by the python script.

Missplaced nodes on the map
Well, blame MaxMind’s GeoIP City database for that. But I think it’s kinda funny to see Tor nodes in Siberia and in the middle of the sea though (look at the West coast of Africa), heh. For those wondering, these nodes are gathered there because their geoip Lat,Long is set to 0,0.
Really though, what’s “Ben’s Cat Shaque” diplayed there next to all those nodes in the west coast of Africa? Anyone has some clue ?

Conspriracy people
I’m sure that people who love conspriracy theories will start posting about those ‘Bad’ Tor nodes in Iran and Syria. Why do you think these are there ? What does it mean ? Let the flames begin!

Future TODO
a. OpenStreetMap
I have started working on an OpenStreetMap implementation of the above using OpenLayers. The biggest hurdle is that OSM does not provide a server that serves map tiles over HTTPS. Makes me wonder…is that actually so difficult ?
b. More stats
I would like to add small graphs on how the number of nodes in each class evolves.

Other Tor mapping efforts
https://b.kentbackman.com/2010/10/04/view-tor-exit-nodes-in-google-earth/
http://freehaven.net/~ioerror/maps/v3-tormap.html

Don’t forget, you can always help Tor by running a node/bridge or sending some money to Tor or EFF!

Filed by kargig at 01:55 under Encryption,Internet,Linux,Networking,Privacy
Tags: Authority, Bad, consensus, debian, geoip, geoipcity, Google maps, html, javascript, map, mapping, maxmind, nginx, OpenStreemMap, python, tor, tormap, tormap.void.gr
1 Comment | 23,714 views