Tor server lists revisited

Way back in 2006, I posted about a way to list active Tor servers by querying the Tor directory. Since then, the Tor project has updated it's directory protocol, so that old method no longer works. Since I had someone ask me about it today, I thought this would be a great time to go ahead and update that post.

The principle is still basically the same:

1. Identify an authoritative Tor server
   
2. Connect to it via HTTP and ask for the router list
   
3. Parse the list to get the info you want.
   

Here's an updated script you can use to dump the information about active routers. The output contains 5 columns, separated by pipe characters ('|'). The columns are :

server name|IP address|onion routing port| \
directory services port|last update timestamp

Now, the first two fields are fairly self-explanatory. The onion routing port (sometimes referred to as the OR port) carries the actual data in a Tor session. The directory services port carries directory traffic (the sort of thing this script does). Not all Tor routers offer directory services, so you will often see a 0 in this column. Finally, the last column simply shows the time the router last updated it's status in the directory.

Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Fetch the list of known Tor servers (from an existing Tor server) and
# display some of the basic info for each router.

use LWP::Simple;

# Hostname of an existing Tor router.  We use one of the directory authorities
# since that's pretty much what they're for.
$INITIAL_TOR_SERVER = "128.31.0.34";   # peacetime/moria1/moria2
$DIR_PORT = 9031;

# Fetch the list of servers
$content = get("http://$INITIAL_TOR_SERVER:$DIR_PORT/tor/status/all");
@lines = split /\n/,$content;

foreach $router (@lines) {
    if($router =~ m/^r\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} \d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})\s+(\S+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)$/) {
        ($name, $address, $or_port, $directory_port, $update_time) =
            ($1, $5, $6, $7, $4);
        print "$name | $address | $or_port | $directory_port | $update_time\n";
    }
}

Of course, there is much more information in the directory than this script shows. As a NSM analyist, I'm more concerned with IPs and port numbers, but if you poke around, you can also find what OS and Tor software versions are running, what capabilities the routers offer, their default exit policies, and other cool stuff. This is all left as an exercise for the reader. If you're interested, read the spec.