A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem

Abstract

Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses, including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally be er known as a conduit for criminal activity and as a platform to market illicit goods and data. Past studies on the content of Tor support this notion, but were carried out by targeting popular domains likely to contain illicit content. A survey of past studies may thus not yield a complete evaluation of the content and use of Tor. is work addresses this gap by presenting a broad evaluation of the content of the English Tor ecosystem. We perform a comprehensive crawl of the Tor dark web and, through topic and network analysis, characterize the 'types' of information and services hosted across a broad swath of Tor domains and their hyperlink relational structure. We recover nine domain types de ned by the information or service they host and, among other ndings, unveil how some types of domains intentionally silo themselves from the rest of Tor. We also present measurements that (regre ably) suggest how marketplaces of illegal drugs and services do emerge as the dominant type of Tor domain. Our study is the product of crawling over 1 million pages from 20,000 Tor seed addresses, yielding a collection of over 150,000 Tor pages. We make a dataset of the intend to make the domain structure publicly available as a dataset at h ps://github.com/wsu-wacs/TorEnglishContent.

Dark Web Traffic Analysis of Cybersecurity Threats Through South African Internet Protocol Address Space

“…These were implemented for non-participation observation in different forums such as drug forums. Zabihimayvan and Sadeghi [52] undertook a crawl of the TOR network to extract data for the study. The researcher developed a multi-threaded crawler that collected the HTML of any TOR website reachable by a depth search starting from a seed list of 20,000 TOR addresses.…”

The secret life of PETs

“…In terms of copyright, the top motivator reported for VPN usage worldwide, for example, is accessing better (read foreign or locally restricted) entertainment content (50 percent), although 77 percent of sampled VPNs users indicated purchasing premium digital content each month (Mardisalu, 2019). Similarly, some Tor domains are dedicated to downloading or even purchasing multimedia content regardless of any existing copyright protection (Zabihimayvan et al , 2019).…”

“…Examples include Silk Road, Silk Road 2.0, Silk Road 3.0, AGORA, CLOUD-NINE and, more recently, AlphaBay and Hansa, (Décary-Hétu and Giommoni, 2017; Soska and Christin, 2015; Van Buskirk et al , 2016). Other goods and services found on cryptomarkets include prescription medicines, forgery services, arms and ammunition (Zabihimayvan et al , 2019; Moore and Rid, 2016; Faizan and Khan, 2019).…”

TOR Gizli Servis Tarayıcılarının Performans Karşılaştırması

“…In the work of [3], a crawler software for the general evaluation of the content and the use of the English TOR ecosystem is developed. In their software, through subject and network analysis, they have characterized web pages and other linked pages which are hosted on the TOR network, in the context of their content.…”

“…In addition, it is necessary to monitor Tor traffic in order to uncover illegal activities and to create related measures. For this purpose, numerous crawler software are being developed [3,4,5]. This softwares send requests to the seed onion address which is given them as a parameter and download the content of that address if the connection is provided.…”