A Privacy-Preserving Longevity Study of Tor's Hidden Services
Amirali Sanatinia, Jeman Park, Erik-Oliver Blass, Aziz Mohaisen,, Guevara Noubir

TL;DR
This study investigates the lifetime of Tor hidden services using privacy-preserving data collection from a small subset of relays, revealing most services are short-lived, which has implications for security and legitimacy assessments.
Contribution
The paper introduces protocols and extrapolation techniques to accurately estimate hidden service lifetimes while preserving user privacy and adhering to Tor's safety guidelines.
Findings
50% of hidden services last 10 days or less
80% of hidden services last less than a month
Small relay subset suffices for accurate lifetime extrapolation
Abstract
Tor and hidden services have emerged as a practical solution to protect user privacy against tracking and censorship. At the same time, little is known about the lifetime and nature of hidden services. Data collection and study of Tor hidden services is challenging due to its nature of providing privacy. Studying the lifetime of hidden services provides several benefits. For example, it allows investigation of the maliciousness of domains based on their lifetime. Short-lived hidden services are more likely not to be legitimate domains, e.g., used by ransomware, as compared to long-lived domains. In this work, we investigate the lifetime of hidden services by collecting data from a small (2%) subset of all Tor HSDir relays in a privacy-preserving manner. Based on the data collected, we devise protocols and extrapolation techniques to infer the lifetime of hidden services. Moreover we…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy-Preserving Technologies in Data · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Wireless Communication Security Techniques
