A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem

Mahdieh Zabihimayvan, Reza Sadeghi, Derek Doran, Mehdi Allahyari

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

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 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 this https URL .

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWebSci '19: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages333-342
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450362023
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 26 2019
Event11th ACM Conference on Web Science - Boston, United States
Duration: Jun 30 2019Jul 3 2019
Conference number: 11

Conference

Conference11th ACM Conference on Web Science
Abbreviated titleWebSci 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period6/30/197/3/19

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • Content Analysis
  • Structural Analysis
  • Tor

Disciplines

  • Computer Sciences
  • Engineering

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