
We’ll also teach you a bit more about the Tor network, the dark web, and cybersecurity best practices. onion sites only available on the dark web through the Tor Browser. So, how do you safely find good websites without stumbling on the sketchy ones? In this article, we’ll introduce you to some of the most helpful and legal. See also – Tor and VPN: everything you need to know The dark web is a place where one can use the internet with increased anonymity, fewer ads, and (for people living in oppressive countries) greater access to global news and resources. However, what is equally true is that the dark web also contains many helpful and perfectly legal websites that are kept off the surface web for privacy. And all of these things are true about the dark web. It brings to mind stories of scams, stolen identities, and dumps of hacked data. When most people think of the dark web, they envision dangerous activity. Finally we discuss a solution to mitigate this and other traffic analysis attacks which exploit Tor's congestion control.What are the most popular Tor websites and how do you find them? Our results show that true positive rates above 94% and false positive rates below 0.05% can be easily obtained. We performed a set of experiments over the real Tor network in order to evaluate the feasibility of this attack. Furthermore, upon detection the watermark is cancelled so that the target onion service remains unaware of its presence.

The proposed watermarking system embeds a watermark at the destination of a Tor circuit which is propagated throughout the Tor network and can be detected by our modified Tor relays in the proximity of the onion service.

In this paper we present Duster, an active traffic analysis attack based on flow watermarking that exploits a vulnerability in Tor's congestion control mechanism in order to link a Tor onion service with its real IP address. Despite the use of the onion routing paradigm, Tor is vulnerable to traffic analysis attacks. Tor is a distributed network composed of volunteer relays which is designed to preserve the sender-receiver anonymity of communications on the Internet.
