Crawling the Dark Web: A Conceptual Perspective, Challenges and Implementation
Bassel AlKhatib, Randa Basheer
Journal of Digital Information Management, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2019.
DOI: 10.6025/jdim/2019/17/2/51-60
Link: http://dline.info/fpaper/jdim/v17i2/jdimv17i2_1.pdf
Abstract:
Internet and network technologies have evolved dramatically in the last two decades, with rising
users' demands to preserve their identities and privacy. Researchers have developed approaches to achieve users' demands, where the biggest part of the internet has formed, the Deep Web. However, as the Deep Web provides the resort for many benign users who desire to preserve their privacy, it also became the perfect floor for hosting illicit activities, which generated the Dark Web. This leads to the necessity of finding automated solutions to support law and security agencies in collecting information from the Dark Web to disclose such activities. In this paper, we illustrate the concepts needed for the development of a crawler that collects information from a dark website. We start from discussing the three layers of the Internet, the characteristics of the hidden and private networks, and the technical features of Tor network. We also addressed the challenges facing the dark web crawler. Finally, we presented our experimental system that fetches data from a dark market. This approach helps in putting a single dark website under investigation, and can be a seed for future research and development.