Abstract
Anonymous communications networks were created to protect the privacy of communications, preventing censorship and traffic analysis. The most famous anonymous communication network is Tor. This anonymous communication network provides some interesting features. Among them, we can mention that Tor can hide a user’s IP address when accessing to a service such as the Web, and it also supports Tor hidden services (THS) (now named onion services) as a mechanism to conceal the server’s IP address, used mainly to provide anonymity to websites. THS is an important research field in Tor. However, there is a lack of reviews that sum up the main findings and research challenges. In this article, we present a systematic literature review that aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the research made on THS by presenting the state-of-the-art and the different research challenges to be addressed. This review has been developed from a selection of 57 articles and presents main findings and advances regarding Tor hidden services, limitations found, and future issues to be investigated.
Highlights
The Onion Router (Tor) [1] is currently the broadest low-latency anonymous communication network and is used every day by many people to protect their privacy and overcome censorship [2,3]
Systematic Literature Review Methodology Our review of the literature of Tor hidden services which we present here is based on a systematic literature review (SLR)
Until version 2 of Tor onion services, there was no significant change in the protocol that dealt with hidden services (HS), and no document addresses the evolution of Tor, the increase in users, and the advancements in the mechanisms that attackers use in the face of an architecture that had evolved very little
Summary
The Onion Router (Tor) [1] is currently the broadest low-latency anonymous communication network and is used every day by many people to protect their privacy and overcome censorship [2,3]. Users use them to access services related to various topics, such as pornography, drugs, politics, security, and anonymity. Due to its popularity and the services it offers, Tor has been broadly studied and many issues regarding it have been analysed. In a taxonomy presented by Saleh et al [5], they classified Tor research topics into deanonymisation, performance analysis and architectural improvements, and path selection. In this analysis, they only covered four papers These hidden services are key within the Tor network and we believe they deserve to be studied in detail. We decided to analyse the state-of-the-art of Tor hidden services For this purpose, we decided to address this issue through a systematic literature review (SLR), wherein we have analysed THS from different points of view.
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