TECHNICAL ARTICLE ON: THE DARK WEB AND IT’S SECRETS

TECHNICAL ARTICLE ON:

THE DARK WEB AND IT’S SECRETS

While much of the internet is readily accessible, certain parts lie hidden beneath intricate layers of obfuscation.  This is basically the dark side of the web that provides a much greater level of anonymity and privacy to its users.

Before proceeding further let us understand the following terms:   

Surface Web: The surface web is content that can be indexed by search engines. Eg: the content that you find on google.

Deep Web: The deep web is content that cannot be indexed by search engines. Eg: Your credit card passwords, Facebook passwords etc.

Dark Web: And the dark web is a fraction of the deep web consisting of numerous darknets which require specific software and/or authorization to access.

Pic: Classification of Web

The idea behind the dark web:

As the internet continued to grow in the mid-to-late 1990s it would come to transform society on a global scale. As long as we had an internet connection we could talk to anyone on earth, of course, if the others were also connected to the internet. Actually, the internet was not designed with things like anonymity and privacy in mind so everything we do and say online can and, in many cases, will be tracked, recorded, and traceable back to you. Hence some people were very concerned about their privacy and in the mid 1990s one such group of people was the United States federal government. A team of computer scientists and mathematicians working for a branch of the US Navy known as the Naval Research Laboratory, abbreviated as NRL, began development of a new technology known as onion routing. Onion routing would allow for anonymous bi-directional communication where the source and destination cannot be determined by a mid-point. This was accomplish by creating something known as an overlay network. (An overlay network is simply a network that is built on top of another network, in this case the internet.)

So instead of using the normal unencrypted internet, also known as the surface web, our traffic goes through an overlay network. Now, there are many different types of overlay networks but a network using onion routing technology would be classified as a darknet.

How can you access the dark net?

A darknet can only be accessed via specific software and/or authorization. All you need to know is that people working for the US government created a system which would allow for anonymous communication over the internet.The network to be truly anonymous it has to be available to everyone and not just the US government. So the NRL was forced to release their onion routing technology to the public. The technology was eventually released under an open source license and became TOR. TOR stands for The Onion Router and is the software you need to download to be able to access this network of onion routers.

Today, millions of people across the globe use TOR for a multitude of purposes. Everything from innocent daily browsing to criminal activities. And while it is the most popular, TOR is but one among numerous darknets. Together they all make up the dark web. Subsequently, the dark web forms a small part of the deep web. The deep web is everything on the web that cannot be indexed by search engines.

But what do we find on the dark web?

More specifically, the darknet known as TOR can be used for almost anything. Browsing the web, checking your email, posting on forums, instant messaging, watching YouTube videos etc. But the dark web aspect comes in the form of hidden services. A hidden service is essentially a website that can only be accessed via TOR and the address for a hidden service will always end in .onion.

So if we attempt to access this hidden service using Google Chrome, nothing happens. It will only connect using specialized software such as the TOR browser. This is the dark web. Well, one site on the dark web. This specific site is known as The Hidden Wiki and attempts to list as many publicly known hidden services as possible. Facebook operates a hidden service. The search engine DuckDuckGo is another.

Info source: Internet

By Sagar Bhusan