Anonymous Tor is Only Partly for Porn

CYBERSPACE—Tor, the anonymous network and free online software, has been subjected to something some people thought could not be done: mapping. The results may not be definitive, but they at least provide a glimpse behind the Tor curtain, which most people presume hides a lot of illegal activity. According to ZDNet’s Larry Seltzer, “Tor is one of those Internet services, like BitTorrent, which is designed to live on without any central administration at all. This enhances—so the theory goes anyway—the anonymity, security and resilience of the network. There's no site for the government or anyone else to shut down that will bring down Tor, nor would it be easy—again, so the theory goes—for the government or any other party to determine who is doing what on Tor.” The government, he reports, has had some success peeling back the anonymous layers of Tor by exploiting vulnerabilities in the network that were addressed by researchers from the University of Luxembourg in a paper presented in May at an IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The flaws have since been repaired, said Seltzer, but not before the Luxembourg team was able to categorize the main activities undertaken by Tor users. “The overall selection of content topics is actually pretty broad,” he wrote. “But 44 percent of the sites are related to drugs, adult content, counterfeit (selling counterfeit products, stolen credit card numbers, hacked accounts, etc.). The Services pages include some which offer money laundering, escrow services, and hiring a killer or a thief. “Further analysis showed that the high-traffic sites are dominated by what appear (based on behavior) to be botnet command and control,” added Seltzer. “Adult sites are also heavily represented among the more popular sites. When you get down to the less-sleazy traffic, it's a small percentage of the total.” The Tor map may be incomplete, however, since the researchers “only looked at services which offered English language pages, and of those they discarded a large chunk which showed the default page of the Torhost.onion3 free anonymous hosting service.” In the end, Seltzer remarks, “So what does this say about Tor? Arguably nothing.” Like a Rorschach test, people see the Tor they want to see and use, and imbue it with the qualities they want rather than ones it inherently has. “There are other ways to communicate anonymously,” concludes Seltzer. “But Tor is with us and the only thing that would stop it is a design flaw so bad that users wouldn't use it anymore.”