Participant Relationship Protocol

Archived criterion

F25-TO: Pending

Archived previous-definition assessment — revision 5.73. Retired in 5.82; excluded from the active matrix and counts. This historical verdict is not a current assessment.

Historical wake-traffic inventory (cutoff retired)

Rationale

Tor client-operation permits use of a consensus that expired less than 24 hours ago when no live consensus is available. Therefore 24 hours of radio silence does not itself imply that this tolerance has elapsed: a consensus with two hours of validity left at shutdown is only 22 hours past expiry on return. Clients can select microdescriptor consensuses and retain cached descriptors. Separately, directory mirrors support consensus diffs from a known consensus; directory compression includes deflate and recommended LZMA for consensuses and diffs. The size of an uncompressed full consensus is consequently not a mandatory endpoint transfer lower bound for this workload. Four public CollecTor microdescriptor consensuses, valid-after 10:00 UTC on 19–22 October 2026, were downloaded and hashed. Local XZ preset-6 compression of full documents produced 677460–690468 bytes. GNU ed-style differences between consecutive daily documents, compressed with the same setting, produced 62348, 77212 and 79548 bytes. Applying each uncompressed difference reconstructed the next document exactly. Only the first diagnostic difference fits within 65536 bytes, leaving 3188 bytes before any other traffic. Deflate level 9 produced 74814, 91308 and 92984 bytes for the same differences. These are measured document transformations, not a Tor endpoint capture or mirror response. Source inspection of Tor tag tor-0.4.8.16 separates cached-consensus usability from refresh scheduling. networkstatus_consensus_is_bootstrapping returns false for a validated reasonably-live consensus. However, update_consensus_networkstatus_downloads sets the next fetch time to now whenever the consensus is outside its strict validity interval, then checks outstanding requests, retry readiness and missing certificates before requesting a fresh consensus. fetch_networkstatus_callback checks normally every 60 seconds, or every second during the specified testing or bootstrap cases. This interval is not a guaranteed grace period after wake. The reasonably-live predicate in this version includes the exact 24-hour expiry boundary. DisableNetwork delays fetches but also closes outbound connections, so it does not provide directory-only suppression while useful traffic continues.

Assessment method

Source control-flow trace of usability, scheduling and disable-network behavior

Source context

Tor tor-0.4.8.16 networkstatus.c, mainloop.c and manual; SHA-256 pins

Outstanding qualification

F25-TO remains Pending. Cache usability does not establish zero refresh traffic. The inspected scheduler does not establish that a complete refresh necessarily finishes before useful delivery either. Do not charge an entire response solely from a scheduled request. The remaining witness must specify retained directory material, loop phase and request state, and count endpoint bytes actually required through delivery, including fresh connections, onion-service lookup and rendezvous. Round436 local GNU-diff compression is not the actual Tor response. This is a version-bounded source trace, not execution of Tor or a statement about every implementation. No criterion or profile change is made.

Public sources

Editorial evidence references

The following identifiers refer to research records not included in this public package; they are not public links.