Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by Douglas S. Massey, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved October 23, 2020 (received for review June 10, 2020)
Significance
Measuring the proportion of Tor anonymity network users who employ the system for malicious purposes is important as this technology can facilitate child abuse, the sale of illicit drugs, and the distribution of malware. We show that only a small fraction of users globally (∼6.7%) likely use Tor for malicious purposes on an average day. However, this proportion clusters unevenly across countries, with more potentially malicious Tor users in “free” countries (∼7.8%) than in “not free” regimes (∼4.8%). These results suggest that the countries which host most of the infrastructure of the network and house the Tor Project plausibly experience a disproportional amount of harm from the Tor anonymity network.
Abstract
The Tor anonymity network allows users to protect their privacy and circumvent censorship restrictions but also shields those distributing child abuse content, selling or buying illicit drugs, or sharing malware online. Using data collected from Tor entry nodes, we provide an estimation of the proportion of Tor network users that likely employ the network in putatively good or bad ways. Overall, on an average country/day, ∼6.7% of Tor network users connect to Onion/Hidden Services that are disproportionately used for illicit purposes. We also show that the likely balance of beneficial and malicious use of Tor is unevenly spread globally and systematically varies based upon a country’s political conditions. In particular, using Freedom House’s coding and terminological classifications, the proportion of often illicit Onion/Hidden Services use is more prevalent (∼7.8%) in “free” countries than in either “partially free” (∼6.7%) or “not free” regimes (∼4.8%).
Footnotes
↵1E.J., A.M.L., and G.O. contributed equally to this work.
- ↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: ejardine{at}vt.edu.
Author contributions: E.J., A.M.L., and G.O. designed research; E.J., A.M.L., and G.O. performed research; E.J., A.M.L., and G.O. analyzed data; E.J., A.M.L., and G.O. wrote the paper; and G.O. provided the data collection.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data Availability.
CSV data for this project, “The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries,” have been deposited in Open Science Foundation and were last accessed on 13 November 2020. The data and code for analysis can be accessed at: https://osf.io/svrdz/?view_only=d676216acb714521b35759238f69c731.
- Copyright © 2020 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries
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