lox

Lox

Lox is a reputation-based bridge distribution system that provides privacy protection to users and their social graph and is open to all users. Lox is written in rust and requires cargo to test. Install Rust. We used Rust version 1.56.0.

To use the docker environment to build the package:

./build-lox.sh
./run-lox.sh

To run each of the tests used for our experimental results run:

cargo test --release -- --nocapture TESTNAME >> TESTNAME.log

Where TESTNAME is one of:

stats_test_trust_levels
stats_test_invitations
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_05
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_010
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_15
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_20
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_25
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_30
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_35
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_40
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_45
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_50
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_55
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_60
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_65
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_70
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_75
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_80
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_85
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_90
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_95
stats_test_percent_blockage_migration_100

Each test takes approximately 20-30 hours to run. However, this can be improved by passing the fast feature. Using this feature, our tests are run for 100 users instead of 10000 users and will produce results comparable to our reported results (with larger error margins). To run individual tests with this flag run:

  cargo test --release --features=fast -- --nocapture TESTNAME >> TESTNAME.log

We have also included the scripts we used to parse the output from each of the Lox tests in the Parsing-results directory. For convenience, copy all of the output log files to the Parsing-results directory and run ./parse_data.sh. This is a python script that uses Python 3.8+ and depends on numpy, matplotlib, and pandas which can be installed with pip3.

To run all tests in fast mode, output the results to the Parsing-results directory, and generate the tables and graphs used in our paper, run:

./run_tests_fast

This should take approximately 9 hours to complete.

Note that: our implementation is coded such that the reachability certificate expires at 00:00 UTC. A workaround has been included in each test to pause if it is too close to this time so the request won't fail. In reality, if the bucket is still reachable, a user could simply request a new reachability token if their request fails for this reason (a new certificate should be available prior to the outdated certificate expiring).