P-19 Crawling Tor Hidden Services and Depicting Interconnectivity
Abstract
The Tor Network is a popular internet platform that automatically encrypts user data and obfuscates identifiable browsing patterns. Hidden services—websites hosted on Tor—have similar security benefits to Tor users. Bulk data on hidden service content and interconnections could benefit law-enforcement agencies performing cyber-crime investigations involving the Tor network. Towards this end, I developed two software solutions. The first, a specialized web crawler, explores Tor from an initial list of hidden services and discovers new ones, downloading HTML page-content from each. The second, a link-aggregation graph script, generates renderable directed graphs depicting discovered links between hidden services.
Thesis Record URL
https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/honors/189
Start Date
3-2-2018 2:30 PM
P-19 Crawling Tor Hidden Services and Depicting Interconnectivity
The Tor Network is a popular internet platform that automatically encrypts user data and obfuscates identifiable browsing patterns. Hidden services—websites hosted on Tor—have similar security benefits to Tor users. Bulk data on hidden service content and interconnections could benefit law-enforcement agencies performing cyber-crime investigations involving the Tor network. Towards this end, I developed two software solutions. The first, a specialized web crawler, explores Tor from an initial list of hidden services and discovers new ones, downloading HTML page-content from each. The second, a link-aggregation graph script, generates renderable directed graphs depicting discovered links between hidden services.
Acknowledgments
J. N. Andrews Honors Program.