These domains sometimes contain prefixes that are human-readable but they are expensive to generate (e.g. Second, onion domains, (akin to URLs for the regular web), are hashes over their public key and consist of a string of letters and numbers, which make them long, complicated, and difficult to remember. First, they can only be accessed over the Tor network. Onion services differ from conventional web services in four ways. This means that any “onion site” or dark web site cannot be physically traced to identify those running the site or where the site is hosted.

They not only offer privacy protection for individuals browsing the web but also allow web servers, and thus websites themselves, to be anonymous. What are onion services?: Onion services were created by the Tor project in 2004. Our work will be presented at the upcoming USENIX Security conference in Baltimore next month and you can read the full paper here or the TLDR version here. To answer some of these pressing questions, we studied how Tor users use onion services. This raises questions such as: is the dark web for illicit content and dealings only? Can it really be useful for day-to-day web privacy protection? And how easy is it to use anonymous browsing and dark web or “onion” sites in the first place?

Recently, for example, Brave, dedicated to protecting user privacy, integrated Tor support to help users surf the web anonymously from a regular browser. Yet, far less is said about how the dark web can actually enhance user privacy or overcome censorship by enabling anonymous browsing through Tor. Want to find US military drone data leaks online? Frolick in a fraudster’s paradise for people’s personal information? Or crawl through the criminal underbelly of the Internet? These are the images that come to most when they think of the dark web and a quick google search for “dark web” will yield many stories like these. By Philipp Winter, Annie Edmundson, Laura Roberts, Agnieskza Dutkowska-Żuk, Marshini Chetty, and Nick Feamster

Tor sites