A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecosystem Mahdieh Zabihimayvan Reza Sadeghi Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering Kno.e.sis Research Center, Wright State University Kno.e.sis Research Center, Wright State University Dayton, OH, USA Dayton, OH, USA
[email protected] [email protected] Derek Doran Mehdi Allahyari Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Computer Science Kno.e.sis Research Center, Wright State University Georgia Southern University Dayton, OH, USA Statesboro, GA, USA
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT It is an open question whether the fundamental and oen nec- Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble essary protections that Tor provides its users is worth its cost: the uses, including as a platform for free speech and information dis- same features that protect the privacy of virtuous users also make semination under the guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally Tor an eective means to carry out illegal activities and to evade law beer known as a conduit for criminal activity and as a platform enforcement. Various positions on this question have been docu- to market illicit goods and data. Past studies on the content of mented [16, 22, 30], but empirical evidence is limited to studies that Tor support this notion, but were carried out by targeting popular have crawled, extracted, and analyzed specic subsets of Tor based domains likely to contain illicit content. A survey of past studies on the type of hosted information, such as drug tracking [12], may thus not yield a complete evaluation of the content and use of homemade explosives [20], terrorist activities [7], or forums [39].