Modeling Structure and Resilience of the Dark Network

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Darknet's unique network structure, showing it combines scale-free and small-world features, and demonstrates its higher resilience compared to the Internet due to adaptive security mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a model capturing the Darknet's topology and explains how security-driven adaptations enhance its resilience against failures and attacks.

Findings

Darknet exhibits scale-free and small-world properties.

The proposed model reproduces Darknet's topology.

Darknet is more resilient than the Internet to various failures.

Abstract

While the statistical and resilience properties of the Internet are no more changing significantly across time, the Darknet, a network devoted to keep anonymous its traffic, still experiences rapid changes to improve the security of its users. Here, we study the structure of the Darknet and we find that its topology is rather peculiar, being characterized by non-homogenous distribution of connections -- typical of scale-free networks --, very short path lengths and high clustering -- typical of small-world networks -- and lack of a core of highly connected nodes. We propose a model to reproduce such features, demonstrating that the mechanisms used to improve cyber-security are responsible for the observed topology. Unexpectedly, we reveal that its peculiar structure makes the Darknet much more resilient than the Internet -- used as a benchmark for comparison at a descriptive level -- to random failures, targeted attacks and cascade failures, as a result of adaptive changes in response to the attempts of dismantling the network across time.