Topic and Importance Evaluation of Tor services
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This document summarizes research analyzing the topics and importance of services on the Tor network. It collected data on over 1 million pages from 3,347 Tor domains. Topic modeling found the most common topics were drugs, marketplaces, and gambling. Betweenness centrality identified directory domains as influential hubs. Eigenvector centrality established the Dream marketplace as the most structurally important "core" Tor service. The research concludes Tor is used for illicit marketplace activity more than open information discovery, and directories are critical for connecting domains.
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Topic and Importance Evaluation of Tor services
- 1. Topic and Importance Evaluation of Tor services Mahdieh Zabihimayvan (Zabihimayvan.2@wright.edu) Advisor: Dr. Derek Doran Feb 2019
- 2. Introduction Dark Web and Tor Research Question Related Work Dataset Collection & Processing Topic Evaluation Importance Evaluation Conclusion & Future Work 2
- 3. World Wide Web Deep Web: Content on the World Wide Web that cannot or has not yet been indexed by search engines Dark Web: A subset of Deep Web that requires unique application layer protocols and authorization schemes Of great interest to parties wanting anonymity while using the web 3
- 4. Tor Network The most popular Dark Web among others (such as I2P, Riffle, and Freenet) 4 .onion
- 5. Work done on Tor Network Conducted over information content of specific Tor pages and domains: drug trafficking homemade explosives terrorist activities dark forums general hackers Drugs weapons 5
- 6. Research Question How diverse is the information and the services provided on Tor? What are the “core” services of Tor? Is there even a core? 6
- 7. Dataset Collection and Processing 7 40,439 English pages belonging to 3,347 domains 150,473 domains 1,236,433 distinct pages
- 9. Topic Evaluation Topic distribution over Tor domains 9
- 10. Importance Evaluation In graph theory and network analysis, indicators of centrality identify the most important vertices within a graph. 10 Betweenness Cent.: Detecting the amount of influence a node has over the flow of information in a graph Closeness Cent.: Measuring the mean distance from a vertex to other vertices EigenVec cent.: Describing the structural importance of a node as a function of the importance of its neighboring nodes
- 11. Importance Evaluation (Betweenness) 11 Domains with Betweenness > 0.05: • HiddenWiki Directory and two directories in the TorWiki • TorBox Email and VFEmail • A Dream market domain.
- 12. Importance Evaluation (Eigenvector) 12 All domains with eigenvector centrality ≥ 0.2 are part of the Dream market. This establishes the Dream market as the most structurally important, “core” service Tor provides. The especially low eigenvector centralities of other domains are further indicative of the significance of the Dream market’s structural importance in Tor.
- 13. Importance Evaluation (Closeness) 13 This outcome is likely the product of the directories HiddenWiki and TorWiki having high Betweenness centrality that enables many pairs of domains to be few hops away from each other via these directories. This underscores the central importance of directory domains to connect Tor pages across domains, and the fact that Tor domains tend to remain undiscoverable without directories.
- 14. Conclusion and Future Work Over half of all domains constitute site directories or marketplaces to purchase and sell goods or services. small proportion of all Tor domains are used for information discovery or cryptocurrency transactions using Bitcoin. The surprisingly large percentage of gambling domains also suggest that people now use Tor to play online gambling games. Our measurements identified the Dream market as perhaps the “core” service of Tor, as Dream market domains exhibit especially high eigenvector centralities. Tor domains tend to remain undiscoverable without directories. 14
- 15. 15 Contact me: Zabihimayvan.2@wright.edu A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem, arXive:1902.06680
Editor's Notes
- circumventing government censorship releasing information to the public sensitive communication between parties private space to buy and sell goods and services. Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is derived from an acronym for the original software project name "The Onion Router".[8][9] Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays[10] to conceal a user's identity. Onion routing is implemented by encryption in the application layer of a communication protocol stack, nested like the layers of an onion.
- Answers to such questions would shed light into the broad structure of the Tor dark web, yield a through understanding of the kinds of services and information available on Tor, and reveal the most popular and important (from a structural perspective) services it provides.
- we present a quantitative characterization of the types of information available across a large swath of English language Tor webpages. We chose to only focus on English pages to facilitate our content analysis. Our crawl encompasses over 1 million addresses, of which 150,473 are hosted on Tor and the remaining 840,527 returns to the visible web. We focus on 40,439 Tor pages belonging to 3,347 English language domains and augment LDA with a topic-labeling algorithm that uses a knowledge base (DBpedia) to assign semantically meaningful categories to the content on every crawled page.
- Tor’s main utility for users may be to browse information and shop on marketplaces that require secrecy. Dream market: The marketplace sells a variety of content, including drugs, stolen data, and counterfeit consumer goods, all using cryptocurrency. In contrast, domains related to the free exchange of ideas and information (a powerful and positive use-case of Tor, particular to users in countries facing Internet censorship [9]), represented by Forum, Email, and News sites, account for just 23.66% of all domains. Gambling domains indicate a surprisingly large (10.19%) percentage of domains, suggesting that people may now be turning to Tor to play online gambling games that are otherwise illegal to host in many countries around the world. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, Bitcoin and multimedia domains respectively constitute the smallest proportion of English Tor domains.
- where {\displaystyle \sigma _{st}} is the total number of shortest paths from node {\displaystyle s} to node {\displaystyle t} and {\displaystyle \sigma _{st}(v)} is the number of those paths that pass through {\displaystyle v}. An attack, removal, or failure of such directories may thus directly impact the number of Tor domains reachable by a casual browser exploring this dark web.
- Eigenvector centrality [12] describes the structural importance of a node as a function of the importance of its neighboring nodes. The eigenvector centrality of vertex v i is given by the i th component of the eigenvector of A whose corresponding eigenvalue is largest. We find a heavily skewed distribution of eigenvector centralities where a majority are close to zero.
- Closeness centrality measures the mean distance from a vertex to other vertices.