Dark Web
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets: overlay networks that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access.[1][2][3][4]
Through the dark web, private computer networks can communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location.[5][6]
The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.[7][2][8]
The darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend networks, as well as large, popular networks such as Tor, Freenet, I2P, and Riffle operated by public organizations and individuals.[6]
Users of the dark web refer to the regular web as Clearnet due to its unencrypted nature.[9]
The Tor dark web or onionland[10] uses the traffic anonymization technique of onion routing under the network's top-level domain suffix .onion.
Identities and locations of darknet users stay anonymous and cannot be tracked due to the layered encryption system.
The darknet encryption technology routes users' data through a large number of intermediate servers, which protects the users' identity and guarantees anonymity.
The transmitted information can be decrypted only by a subsequent node in the scheme, which leads to the exit node.
The complicated system makes it almost impossible to reproduce the node path and decrypt the information layer by layer.[17]
Due to the high level of encryption, websites are not able to track geolocation and IP of their users, and users are not able to get this information about the host.
Thus, communication between darknet users is highly encrypted allowing users to talk, blog, and share files confidentially.[18]
Dark Web Content:
A December 2014 study by Gareth Owen from the University of Portsmouth found that the most commonly hosted type of content on Tor was child pornography, followed by black markets, while the individual sites with the highest traffic were dedicated to botnet operations (see attached metric).[22]
Many whistleblowing sites maintain a presence[23] as well as political discussion forums.[24]
Sites associated with Bitcoin, fraud-related services, and mail order services are some of the most prolific.[22]
As of December 2020, the number of active Tor sites in .onion was estimated at 76,300 (containing a lot of copies). Of these, 18 000 would have original content.[25]
In July 2017, Roger Dingledine, one of the three founders of the Tor Project, said that Facebook is the biggest hidden service. The dark web comprises only 3% of the traffic in the Tor network.[26]