Dizzy: Large-Scale Crawling and Analysis of Onion Services
Yazan Boshmaf, Isuranga Perera, Udesh Kumarasinghe, Sajitha Liyanage, Husam Al Jawaheri · 2023
With nearly 2.5m users, onion services have become the prominent part of the darkweb. Over the last five years alone, the number of onion domains has increased 20x, reaching more than 700k unique domains in January 2022. As onion services host various types of illicit content, they have become a valuable resource for darkweb research and an integral part of e-crime investigation and threat intelligence. However, this content is largely un-indexed by today’s search engines and researchers have to rely on outdated or manually-collected datasets that are limited in scale, scope, or both.