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While anonymity networks such as Tor provide invaluable privacy guarantees to society, they also enable all kinds of criminal activities. Consequently, many blameless citizens shy away from protecting their privacy using such technology for…
Tor and hidden services have emerged as a practical solution to protect user privacy against tracking and censorship. At the same time, little is known about the lifetime and nature of hidden services. Data collection and study of Tor…
Tor is a communications infrastructure widely used for unfettered and anonymous access to Internet websites. Tor is also used to access sites on the .onion virtual domain. The focus of .onion use and discussion has traditionally been on the…
The rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT) landscape is shifting toward cloudless architectures, removing reliance on centralized cloud services but exposing devices directly to the internet and increasing their vulnerability to…
Tor is the most widely used anonymity network, currently serving millions of users each day. However, there is no access control in place for all these users, leaving the network vulnerable to botnet abuse and attacks. For example,…
Web is a primary and essential service to share information among users and organizations at present all over the world. Despite the current significance of such a kind of traffic on the Internet, the so-called Surface Web traffic has been…
In contemporary times, people rely heavily on the internet and search engines to obtain information, either directly or indirectly. However, the information accessible to users constitutes merely 4% of the overall information present on the…
With nearly 2.5m users, onion services have become the prominent part of the darkweb. Over the last five years alone, the number of onion domains has increased 20x, reaching more than 700k unique domains in January 2022. As onion services…
Dark web crawling is a complex process that involves specific methodologies and techniques to navigate the Tor network and extract data from hidden services. This study proposes a general dark web crawler designed to extract pages handling…
There was a time when the word security was only confined to the physical protection of things that were valuable which must be guarded against all the odds. Today, in a world where people can do things virtually have emerged the necessity…
The increasing use of encrypted data within file storage and in network communications leaves investigators with many challenges. One of the most challenging is the Tor protocol, as its main focus is to protect the privacy of the user, in…
Darknet technology such as Tor has been used by various threat actors for organising illegal activities and data exfiltration. As such, there is a case for organisations to block such traffic, or to try and identify when it is used and for…
Ever since the introduction of the internet, it has been void of any privacy. The majority of internet traffic currently is and always has been unencrypted. A number of anonymous communication overlay networks exist whose aim it is to…
Tor Onion Services are a way to host websites and other internet services anonymously. Onion Services are often used to bypass internet censorship and provide information services to users in oppressive regimes. This paper presents an…
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its…
Tor is currently one of the more popular systems for anonymizing near real-time communications on the Internet. Recently, Borisov et al. proposed a denial of service based attack on Tor (and related systems) that significantly increases the…
We develop a means to detect ongoing per-country anomalies in the daily usage metrics of the Tor anonymous communication network, and demonstrate the applicability of this technique to identifying likely periods of internet censorship and…
Current anonymizing networks have become an important tool for guaranteeing users' privacy. However, these platforms can be used to perform illegitimate actions, which sometimes makes service providers see traffic coming from these networks…
Tor is widely used for staying anonymous online and accessing onion websites; unfortunately, Tor is popular for distributing and viewing illicit child sexual abuse material (CSAM). From 2018 to 2023, we analyse 176,683 onion domains and…
Several hundred Tor exit relays together push more than 1 GiB/s of network traffic. However, it is easy for exit relays to snoop and tamper with anonymised network traffic and as all relays are run by independent volunteers, not all of them…