Date of Award

4-4-2018

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Department

Engineering & Computer Science

First Advisor

Rodney L. Summerscales

Abstract

The Tor network is a popular online privacy platform that enables anonymous browsing, but is also notorious for the vast number of illicit marketplaces, goods and services available to users. Tor's protocols also secure hosted websites, known as hidden services, against unwanted tracking and location. Tor has attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies, who are interested in hidden service data analysis. However, little large-scale analysis is currently performed. To help address this issue, I constructed two tools. A specialized web crawler downloads bulk page-content from Tor's hidden services. This program crawls the Tor Network broadly, securely, and with more ease of use than other similar solutions. A graphing program depicts connections between crawled hidden services as directed graphs. Both of these tools allow investigative agencies and researchers to more effectively gather and analyze Tor network content.

Subject Area

Invisible Web; Tor (Anonymity network)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/189/

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