A study explores the proportion of users of the Tor anonymity network who likely engage in illicit or malicious activity. The Tor anonymity network, also known as the Dark Web, allows users to protect their anonymity, thereby allowing activities ranging from circumvention of government censorship to the sale of illegal guns and drugs. Eric Jardine and colleagues collected data on Tor users' traffic and country of origin to estimate malicious usage. On an average day, the authors found that around 6.7% of Tor users connected to "Onion/Hidden Services," which are sites with rendezvous points within the Tor network with a preponderance of traffic connecting to illicit sites. Users from countries with free governments were more likely to access the Hidden Services sites, at around 7.8%, than users from partially free countries, at around 6.7%, or regimes that are not free, at around 4.8%. According to the authors, the results suggest that users in the free countries in which most of the Tor network infrastructure is hosted likely account for a disproportionate amount of societal harm through illegal and malicious activity.
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Article #20-11893:
"The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries ," by Eric Jardine, Andrew M. Lindner, and Gareth Owenson.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Eric Jardine,
Virginia Tech,
Blacksburg, VA;
e-mail: <ejardine@vt.edu>