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%).
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.
Debate rages about the social utility of an anonymous portion of the global Internet accessible via the Tor network and colloquially known as the Dark Web. Although other similar tools exist, The Onion Router (Tor) is currently the largest anonymity network. Tor users can act as publishers of content by using the network to anonymously administer Onion/Hidden Services for the use of others. They can also use the Tor browser to anonymously read either these Onion/Hidden Services (i.e., sites with rendezvous points located internal to the Tor network) or to access Clear Web sites. With these diverse supply-side and demand-side functions, many point to the socially harmful uses of Tor as an anonymous platform for child abuse imagery sites, illicit drug markets, gun sales, and potential extremist content that has shifted to the Dark Web after extensive Clear Web content moderation efforts. Others emphasize its socially beneficial potential as a privacy-enhancing tool and censorship circumvention technology.
Both sides of the debate illustrate genuine uses of the technology. Like any tool that is inherently dual use, questions abound about whether its benefits are worth the costs. Such questions have both net (i.e., do costs or benefits predominate) and distributional (i.e., how are the harms/benefits spread out) dimensions. Overall, a technology like the Tor anonymity network might do more harm than good. It may also be more harmful in some locations than others. Ultimately, these are empirical questions. In the case of the Tor anonymity network, our data provide clear, if probabilistic, answers to these questions. Our data show that in net terms, only a small fraction of Tor users employ the anonymity system for likely malicious purposes. On an average day during our sample period, for example, about 6.7% of Tor network clients globally use the network to connect to “Onion/Hidden Services” that are predominantly used for illicit and illegal activities, such as buying drugs, distributing malware, or consuming and sharing child abuse imagery content. To be sure, there some socially beneficial content on Onion/Hidden Services and plenty of troubling content on the Clear Web.
However, substantial evidence has shown that the preponderance of Onion/Hidden Services traffic connects to illicit sites. With this important caveat in mind, our data also show that the distribution of potentially harmful and beneficial uses is uneven, clustering predominantly in politically free regimes. In particular, the average rate of likely malicious use of Tor in our data for countries coded by Freedom House as “not free” is just 4.8%. In countries coded as “free,” the percentage of users visiting Onion/Hidden Services as a proportion of total daily Tor use is nearly twice as much or ∼7.8%. These findings are robust to a different measure of political freedom and the inclusion of a variety of statistical controls. They also give rise to a number of important public policy challenges.
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