Abstract
The web graph can be used to get insight into the internal structure and connectivity of the Tor dark web. This paper analyzes the internal structure of the Tor dark web graph and examines the presence of bow-tie structure as found in the World Wide Web. The web graph is generated from the data collected by the Python crawler customized to scrape data from the Tor dark web. Each of the nodes in the graph represents an individual Tor hidden service, and an edge denotes the hyperlink from one hidden service to the other. Various graph metrics are then computed and analyzed for both directed and undirected graphs using the Python NetworkX package. It was found that most of the nodes of the graph have in-degree and out-degree less than ten. The presence of power-law in degree distribution could neither be confirmed nor denied. The Tor web graph is sparse with a few connected pairs of nodes. Like the surface web, the dark web can also be decomposed into a bow-tie structure though with small component sizes. Several important and well-known websites on the surface web have incoming links from the dark web. Moreover, the Tor network also shows the characteristics of small-world and scale-free networks.
Highlights
A web graph can be described as a collection of vertices and edges where a single vertex depicts a web page, and an edge between two vertices is a directed hyperlink from a web page to the other
On adding the nodes having in-degree up to 10, we get ∼97% of total nodes. This result is in line with the previous study [16] about the hidden nature of Tor web pages that are difficult to discover as they have few incoming links
In this study, the authors have performed an analysis of the Tor web graph at the domain level
Summary
A web graph can be described as a collection of vertices and edges where a single vertex depicts a web page, and an edge between two vertices is a directed hyperlink from a web page to the other. All the vertices and edges belong to the World Wide Web or the Internet. The study of web graph may help in identifying the underlying structure of the Internet of how the different web pages are linked to each other. They help in developing efficient data mining techniques and better crawling strategies. The exponential growth in the size of the World Wide Web has attracted the scientific community to investigate its graph structural properties with various aspects [1]–[4]. Dark Web is a portion of the Internet that can only be accessed using sophisticated routing techniques.
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