Related papers: A Broad Evaluation of the Tor English Content Ecos…
Recent research has suggested that there are clear differences in the language used in the Dark Web compared to that of the Surface Web. As studies on the Dark Web commonly require textual analysis of the domain, language models specific to…
We collect and analyze the darkweb (a.k.a. the "onionweb") hyperlink graph. We find properties highly dissimilar to the well-studied world wide web hyperlink graph; for example, our analysis finds that >87% of darkweb sites never link to…
The ability to accurately detect and filter offensive content automatically is important to ensure a rich and diverse digital discourse. Trolling is a type of hurtful or offensive content that is prevalent in social media, but is…
Online social media has become increasingly popular in recent years due to its ease of access and ability to connect with others. One of social media's main draws is its anonymity, allowing users to share their thoughts and opinions without…
Anonymity systems such as Tor aim to enable users to communicate in a manner that is untraceable by adversaries that control a small number of machines. To provide efficient service to users, these anonymity systems make full use of…
Internet users highly rely on and trust web search engines, such as Google, to find relevant information online. However, scholars have documented numerous biases and inaccuracies in search outputs. To improve the quality of search results,…
Recent years have seen increased interest in the online presence of extreme right groups. Although originally composed of dedicated websites, the online extreme right milieu now spans multiple networks, including popular social media…
The deep and darkweb (d2web) refers to limited access web sites that require registration, authentication, or more complex encryption protocols to access them. These web sites serve as hubs for a variety of illicit activities: to trade…
Online services that desire to operate anonymously routinely host themselves as 'Hidden Services' in the Tor network. However, these services are frequently threatened by deanonymization attacks, whereby their IP address and location may be…
Tor is the most well-known tool for circumventing censorship. Unfortunately, Tor traffic has been shown to be detectable using deep-packet inspection. WebRTC is a popular web frame-work that enables browser-to-browser connections. Snowflake…
In this study, we reveal, for the first time, popular online social networks (especially Twitter) are being extensively abused by miscreants to promote illicit goods and services of diverse categories. This study is made possible by…
Toxicity is an increasingly common and severe issue in online spaces. Consequently, a rich line of machine learning research over the past decade has focused on computationally detecting and mitigating online toxicity. These efforts…
In the era of big data, we continuously - and at times unknowingly - leave behind digital traces, by browsing, sharing, posting, liking, searching, watching, and listening to online content. When aggregated, these digital traces can provide…
The Tor network enhances clients' privacy by routing traffic through an overlay network of volunteered intermediate relays. Tor employs a distributed protocol among nine hard-coded Directory Authority (DA) servers to securely disseminate…
This research investigated how online criminal activities can be better understood and connected using data-driven machine learning methods. Many illegal activities, such as human trafficking and illicit trade, have moved to online…
Privacy is a well-understood concept in the physical world, with us all desiring some escape from the public gaze. However, while individuals might recognise locking doors as protecting privacy, they have difficulty practising equivalent…
Dark humor often relies on subtle cultural nuances and implicit cues that require contextual reasoning to interpret, posing safety challenges that current static benchmarks fail to capture. To address this, we introduce a novel multimodal,…
Internet censorship is enforced by numerous governments worldwide, however, due to the lack of publicly available information, as well as the inherent risks of performing active measurements, it is often hard for the research community to…
Website fingerprinting (WF) is a dangerous attack on web privacy because it enables an adversary to predict the website a user is visiting, despite the use of encryption, VPNs, or anonymizing networks such as Tor. Previous WF work almost…
Toxic Online Content (TOC) includes messages on digital platforms that are harmful, hostile, or damaging to constructive public discourse. Individuals, organizations, and LLMs respond to TOC through counterspeech or counternarrative…