Offences, child pornography sites are the most popular among the hidden services, websites that only via the Tor network to visit. That says researcher Gareth Owen, who Tor-relays revolved around visits to hidden services to register.
Researcher Owen, that his findings from the cloth did on the CCC security conference in Hamburg, studied for six months the Tor network with forty Tor-relays and mat for example, which hidden services are the most popular. Offences, child pornography sites appeared in popularity with head and shoulders above other sites sticking out. The number of offences, child pornography sites is: there are relatively few hidden services that are child pornography, but which are the most popular.
In the practice of hosting all the websites that “abuse” were classified child pornography.
Tor is a combination of software and a network of routers that can be used relatively anonymously, surf the internet, which also censorship can be circumvented. The traffic through multiple nodes led; the first node knows who the user is but know the content of the traffic, while the last node is only the content of the traffic and not the identity of the user knows. Tor is written in full for The Onion Router: the traffic is as it were ‘peeled off’.
Tor can be used to ‘normal’ websites to visit that also, by default, all are accessible, but also to special Tor-sites accessible only via Tor which can be visited. Which sites are hidden services called, though the name of ‘darknets’ or ‘the deep web’ under governments also popular. Just as the visitors of Tor is the hidden services anonymously. It was that hidden services that Owen, who is affiliated with the University of Portsmouth, examined.
With the Tor nodes that Owen turned, he could measure how often the unique address of a hidden service was requested. With a crawler was vervogens the contents of the root of the domain brought in, which the sites could be classified. Owen has, however, not all hidden services, counting and indexing, but only the hidden services, which through its nodes were visited.
“We were surprised by the results”, says Owen. Sites that classify as ‘abuse’ – in all cases, websites that have child pornography offered turned out to be by far the most popular. It is hard to tell how popular exactly they are: Owen knew only the number of hidden service directory requests to measure. A hsdr is in between a unique visitor and a visit, and is done again if a new connection to the Tor network. Eighty percent of the hsdr out to a kinderpornosite to go. It is not possible to say whether a hsdr is done by a man; the number of requests may also be inflated by bots and spiders that the sites, for example, indexing.
According to Owen would administrators of Tor-relays may decide to request to offences, child pornography sites are not more to process, or would the administrators of the Tor network, the sites can block it. “I’m not saying that that should happen, I’m just saying that it is technically possible”, emphasizes the researcher. “Or that should happen, the Tor project decisions.”
Furthermore, the research shows that websites with regard to drugs are most popular, followed by marketplaces and sites that as a ‘fraud’ label. Also the software is often used for command-and-control servers of botnets, something that is already known. Many hidden services appear only briefly in the air, and after a few days disappeared again.
The Tor project has previously indicated that the project is a misuse of the Tor software takes very seriously, but that the project has no web sites want to block or backdoors wants to build. “It is dangerous if the policymakers to assume that blocking and filtering is a good solution,” according to the project. According to Tor, it is better to the problem is actually to solve than to hide it. In addition, stresses the project, technology will always be criminals to be abused.
Earlier on Tuesday, said Jacob Appelbaum, the developer of the Tor project, that law enforcement agencies regularly put pressure on the project to backdoors in to build. He called his audience, therefore, to the public for Tor. “The pressure is very heavy, and we can’t do it alone,” says Appelbaum.
Update, 22:52: Roger Dingledine, the lead developer of Tor, wrote in a response that traffic to hidden services only 1.5 per cent of the Tor traffic. The Tor project comes later with more information.