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Spiders like Onions: on the Network of Tor Hidden Services

Published: 13 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Tor hidden services allow offering and accessing various Internet resources while guaranteeing a high degree of provider and user anonymity. So far, most research work on the Tor network aimed at discovering protocol vulnerabilities to de-anonymize users and services. Other work aimed at estimating the number of available hidden services and classifying them. Something that still remains largely unknown is the structure of the graph defined by the network of Tor services. In this paper, we describe the topology of the Tor graph (aggregated at the hidden service level) measuring both global and local properties by means of well-known metrics. We consider three different snapshots obtained by extensively crawling Tor three times over a 5 months time frame. We separately study these three graphs and their shared “stable” core. In doing so, other than assessing the renowned volatility of Tor hidden services, we make it possible to distinguish time dependent and structural aspects of the Tor graph. Our findings show that, among other things, the graph of Tor hidden services presents some of the characteristics of social and surface web graphs, along with a few unique peculiarities, such as a very high percentage of nodes having no outbound links.

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  • (2023)Exploring the availability, protocols and advertising of Tor v3 domains2023 JNIC Cybersecurity Conference (JNIC)10.23919/JNIC58574.2023.10205938(1-8)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '19: The World Wide Web Conference
May 2019
3620 pages
ISBN:9781450366748
DOI:10.1145/3308558
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Complex Networks
  2. Dark Web
  3. Tor
  4. Web Graph

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WWW '19
WWW '19: The Web Conference
May 13 - 17, 2019
CA, San Francisco, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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  • (2024)Updated exploration of the Tor network: advertising, availability and protocols of onion servicesWireless Networks10.1007/s11276-024-03679-430:9(7527-7541)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Security, information, and structure characterization of Tor: a surveyTelecommunication Systems10.1007/s11235-024-01149-y87:1(239-255)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
  • (2023)Exploring the availability, protocols and advertising of Tor v3 domains2023 JNIC Cybersecurity Conference (JNIC)10.23919/JNIC58574.2023.10205938(1-8)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Cutting Onions With Others' Hands: A First Measurement of Tor Proxies in the Wild2023 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.23919/IFIPNetworking57963.2023.10186440(1-9)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
  • (2023)Dizzy: Large-Scale Crawling and Analysis of Onion ServicesProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security10.1145/3600160.3600167(1-11)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Poker Face Defense: Countering Passive Circuit Fingerprinting Adversaries in Tor Hidden Services2023 International Conference on IT and Industrial Technologies (ICIT)10.1109/ICIT59216.2023.10335871(1-7)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Exploring Dark Web Crawlers: A Systematic Literature Review of Dark Web Crawlers and Their ImplementationIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.325516511(35914-35933)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)On the gathering of Tor onion addressesFuture Generation Computer Systems10.1016/j.future.2023.02.024145:C(12-26)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Recognition of tor malware and onion servicesJournal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques10.1007/s11416-023-00476-z20:2(261-275)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2023
  • (2022)SoK: An Evaluation of the Secure End User Experience on the Dark Net through Systematic Literature ReviewJournal of Cybersecurity and Privacy10.3390/jcp20200182:2(329-357)Online publication date: 27-May-2022
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