23,565 research outputs found
Content and popularity analysis of Tor hidden services
Tor hidden services allow running Internet services while protecting the
location of the servers. Their main purpose is to enable freedom of speech even
in situations in which powerful adversaries try to suppress it. However,
providing location privacy and client anonymity also makes Tor hidden services
an attractive platform for every kind of imaginable shady service. The ease
with which Tor hidden services can be set up has spurred a huge growth of
anonymously provided Internet services of both types. In this paper we analyse
the landscape of Tor hidden services. We have studied Tor hidden services after
collecting 39824 hidden service descriptors on 4th of Feb 2013 by exploiting
protocol and implementation flaws in Tor: we scanned them for open ports; in
the case of HTTP services, we analysed and classified their content. We also
estimated the popularity of hidden services by looking at the request rate for
hidden service descriptors by clients. We found that while the content of Tor
hidden services is rather varied, the most popular hidden services are related
to botnets.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 2 table
A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem
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 better 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.
This 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 defined by the information
or service they host and, among other findings, unveil how some types of
domains intentionally silo themselves from the rest of Tor. We also present
measurements that (regrettably) 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
https://github.com/wsu-wacs/TorEnglishContent.Comment: 11 page
BlockTag: Design and applications of a tagging system for blockchain analysis
Annotating blockchains with auxiliary data is useful for many applications.
For example, e-crime investigations of illegal Tor hidden services, such as
Silk Road, often involve linking Bitcoin addresses, from which money is sent or
received, to user accounts and related online activities. We present BlockTag,
an open-source tagging system for blockchains that facilitates such tasks. We
describe BlockTag's design and present three analyses that illustrate its
capabilities in the context of privacy research and law enforcement
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