What is the Dark Web in Technical and Practical Terms?
The emergence of networks within the network
The 2000s saw the emergence of a need for technologies to guarantee anonymity on the Internet. A few pioneers came up with the idea of creating a “network within the network”.
First, Ian Clark launched the initial version of Freenet, a fully distributed network to store information anonymously. In 2003, the developer zzz launched the first version of I2P (Internet Invisible Protocol), a decentralised network to enable anonymous communication. Then Tor was developed based on research carried out in the 1990s, with its first public version released in 2004.
Freenet, I2P and TOR: the three pillars of the dark web.
Figure 1 – https://freenetproject.org
Figure 2- https://geti2p.net
Figure 3- https://www.torproject.org
|
|
Freenet |
I2P |
TOR |
Web |
|
Anonymous communication by design |
YES |
YES |
YES |
NO |
|
The hidden Internet |
CHK: / SSK: |
b32.i2p sites |
.onion sites |
Deep web |
|
Anonymous access to the web |
NO |
NO |
YES |
NO |
|
Anonymous storage |
YES |
NO |
NO |
NO |
|
Friend-to-Friend |
YES |
NO |
NO |
NO |
|
Type / Design |
Distributed |
Decentralised |
Decentralised |
Centralised |
Freenet: The strongest anonymity.
It is very resilient, offering the greatest anonymity of the three. It stores information anonymously using a distributed network and distributed data storage. It led to the creation of a dark web comprising sites made exclusively of files. It also enables communication via forums or social networks. The fact that it is fully distributed makes it very resilient, but also slow.
I2P : Anonymity with flexibility.
It is very flexible and can anonymise other technologies such as the torrent download protocol. It allows users to use torrent-based download tools discreetly.
Like Tor and Freenet, I2P has its own dark web made of micro websites hosted on your computer (ending in b32.i2p). It can only be accessed via the anonymous I2P network.
Tor: The most used network.
Like I2P, Tor comprises several websites with names ending in .onion. It is the largest network in terms of content. Sites on the Tor network are formatted almost exactly like sites on the clear web, but its success stems from its ability to anonymise web access.
Though Tor is by far the most widely used network on the dark web, each of these technologies has specific features that are useful:
- Tor: anonymous access to the regular web
- Freenet: resilient and anonymous storage
- I2P: multi-protocol anonymisation.
It is because Tor (and more specifically the Tor Browser) grants access to the regular web that the dark web was able to develop as a set of hidden sites ending in .onion, which are accessible using the same browser.
You must install the Tor Browser, which only gives you access to its home page. It then directs you to conduct searches on the Duck Duck Go search engine, which only shows results from the clear web. You’ll then need to find an entry point (directories of onion sites or search engines specifically for the Tor network).
What about the web?
… and the webs! The democratisation and rapid growth of the Internet have made search engines key to the web’s accessibility. However, some sites are poorly referenced by these search engines, or not at all. They are either “lost” in the vastness of the Internet (appearing in the last pages of results, which no one reads), or webmasters purposely design them so they are not found. This hard-to-access part of the web became the deep web, as opposed to the clear web (the web most people use). Unlike the dark web, clear and deep web sites use the same centralised non-anonymous by design technology.
