Communications of the ACM
Researchers Index Dark Web, Find Most of It Contains Illegal Material
A recent study tried to catalog how much of Tor is devoted to illegal content via hidden services.
Credit: Extreme Tech
King's College London researchers recently conducted a study to discover how much of Tor, a network composed of layers of encrypted relays through which data is passed, is devoted to illegal content.
Most people use Tor to reach sites on the open Internet anonymously, but there also are sites hosted entirely within Tor, called hidden services. It is these hidden services sites that the researchers sought to quantify.
In order to get a proper sample of all the hidden services within Tor, the researchers built a Python script that that explored the dark web, starting with the popular Tor search engines Onion City and Ahmia. The bot's job was to scrape the content from each page and upload it for analysis; when the bot found a link to another hidden service, it would jump to that one and scrape it, too. The researchers used an algorithm to process all the content collected and sort it into categories. The script indexed 5,205 live websites and a total of 2,723 pages were classified by content.
According to the analysis, 57 percent of the sites hosted illicit content, and there are about 35,000 total hidden services active within Tor; the goal of the project is to establish a more moderate perspective on the role of encryption.
From Extreme Tech
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