WORKING OF THE DARK WEB

Suppose you are browsing the internet on a regular web browser like Chrome,
Firefox, etc you request websites by making simple requests to servers without any
intermediary. It’s just a single connection between a client and a server i.e., The browser
communicates with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to do a Domain Name Search (DNS)
of the IP address for the web server that hosts the website you searched for. The DNS service
will first contact a Root Name Server and replies with the IP address of the name server. This
address is sent back to your DNS service. Once the ISP receives the IP address of the
destination server, it sends it to your web browser. And this is how you get access to the
website or pages you have requested for. One can easily trace the activity on your network
and can know which server your computer is contacting.
But when it comes to dark web, there is another mechanism known as the ‘Onion
Routing’ which is important to maintain security and anonymity . For example, you want
to access a banned site on the internet from your location and you do not want your
government to know your activity. You decide to use “Tor” which is a special browser that
lets you use the onion routers. Your computer needs to contact a particular server through
Tor to get the homepage of the website you requested for but it doesn’t directly contact that
server as mentioned above as it is with a regular surface browser. It does that through
several nodes/servers/routers which are intermediary and are maintained all over the world.
Before reaching that main server or the destination server you requested access for, the
message is relayed several times at several nodes and at each node a new layer of
anonymity is added so that no one can trace back your conversation with that server.
Onion routing provides enhanced security by encrypting data multiple times and
routing it through several servers, making it difficult for attackers to intercept or tamper
with the communication. 1 It is also resistant to Traffic Analysis i.e. makes it difficult for
attackers to analyse the traffic patterns and identify the source and destination of the
communication.2 And most importantly, it hides the IP addresses of the sender and receiver
thereby enhancing privacy and security. It is also decentralized i.e. there is no single central
authority or centre to have a control over it which enables it to access content and pages
which are banned by the governments as well as the internet service providers.

1
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/onion-routing/
2
Ibid.
WHY IS IT A MATTER OF CONCERN

There has been an alarming increase in the use of Dark web for various activities. The data
given below shows the top-10 countries by estimated number of directly-connecting clients.
These numbers are derived from directory requests counted on directory
authorities and mirrors. Relays resolve client IP addresses to country codes, so that numbers
are available for most countries.

Country Mean daily users

Germany 2093057 (50.49 %)
United States 526790 (12.71 %)
Finland 102776 (2.48 %)
India 96482 (2.33 %)
Russia 77989 (1.88 %)
Indonesia 72477 (1.75 %)
Netherlands 65447 (1.58 %)
France 64764 (1.56 %)
United
63477 (1.53 %)
Kingdom
Iran 50822 (1.23 %)

SOURCE: TOR PROJECT

According to the publicly available data on Tor‘s website, the number of active Tor users has
been more or less steady since the beginning of the year (2022), never dropping under two
million.
Getting into the demographics of the Tor services, According to dark web statistics, the US
accounted for 34.81% of the Dark Web daily user count. This translates to 831,911 users.
Russia took second place with 11.46%, and Germany ranked third with 7.16% of total active
users. Of the total users, As many as 70.79% of 2018 survey respondents claimed to use Tor
for anonymity. Furthermore, 62.28% said they used for additional security, while 27.07%
used it out of curiosity about the dark web. As many as 58.8% of Tor users had a
postgraduate degree. Right below were graduates and high school graduates, each comprising
17.7% of interviewed users. Only 5.9% of this dark web browser had no degree. A 2018
online survey showed that around 84.7% of dark web users are male. The female population
made up only about 9.4% of the total number of users.