Abstract:
Tor Proxies are principally designed for allowing users to easily access hidden services in Tor network through standard browsers instead of dedicated software (e.g., Tor...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Tor Proxies are principally designed for allowing users to easily access hidden services in Tor network through standard browsers instead of dedicated software (e.g., Tor Browser), which is user-friendly but at the expense of anonymity. At present, Tor proxies are volunteer-run without any central management. As a result, it still remains unclear the scale and usage of Tor proxies in the wild throughout the Internet. In light of this, we perform the first large-scale measurement study of Tor proxies through passively identifying Tor proxies worldwide and then conduct initial analysis based on the identified Tor proxies. We cooperate with one of the most popular public DNS resolvers and collect passive DNS for the last 4 years with hundreds of billions of raw DNS records per day. To analyze the usage of Tor proxies, we also crawl newly observed webpages of hidden services accessed via Tor proxies for two years. We propose several techniques to identify the Tor proxies and find about 700 historically valid and 130 online Tor proxies in over 30 countries. We also provide several insightful findings and promising directions to motivate future work on this topic.
Published in: 2023 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)
Date of Conference: 12-15 June 2023
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 24 July 2023
ISBN Information:
Electronic ISSN: 1861-2288