A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem

Speaker/Bio

Mahdieh Zabihimayvan is a PhD candidate of computer science at Wright State University and a graduate research assistant working on machine learning and soft computing techniques. Through several theoretical and applied projects, she has explored various concepts from computer networks and Web mining to machine learning and anomaly detection. She is particularly interested in machine learning for web systems security and web systems characterization, measurements, and analytics.

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 do- mains 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 de ned 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 crawl- ing 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 https://github.com/wsu-wacs/TorEnglishContent.

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