How do onion sites ensure anonymity for their users and website owners?
How do onion sites ensure anonymity
For internet users zealous about privacy, there’s no better way to ensure anonymity than with a Tor hidden service. These websites are accessed via the Tor network, which encrypts all traffic and makes it nearly impossible for eavesdroppers to see your IP address. And while there are plenty of onion sites populated by none-too-savory characters, some are legitimate services for people seeking social change or who live in countries where the internet is blocked or censored.
Facebook’s Facebook list of onion sites, for example, allows people to chat over the platform without worrying about their privacy, even in countries with strict censorship laws. The company developed the site after recognizing that many of its users were being blocked and sought ways to allow them to use the service if they could.
But while the onion site works like its clearnet counterpart, it has one significant difference: Unlike the regular Facebook website, the onion page cannot be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. Instead, it requires a separate browser that can access the Tor network and navigate deep web sites.
How do onion sites ensure anonymity for their users and website owners?
This is not a perfect solution, as the Tor browser can still be vulnerable to security issues, but it’s much safer than trying to access a traditional website with a VPN that might reveal your identity and/or location.
In order to navigate a Tor hidden service, you need a special browser, like Torch, which provides added protection from the internet’s spies. This search engine is the longest-running on the Tor network and boasts more than 1 billion indexed onion links. It also doesn’t collect your personal information or censor search results, so you can find exactly what you’re looking for on the Dark Web.
However, finding a specific onion site can be difficult. This is because the.onion domains are hard to remember. They consist of an RSA public key hashed down to 80 bits, and then encoded into a base32 string of 16 characters (e.g., expyuzz4wqqyqhjn). While this helps to maintain security by preventing domain hijacking, it makes them hard to read, write, and remember.
To help address this issue, a number of researchers have proposed solutions to make onion domains more usable. Sai and Fink propose a mnemonic system that maps these binary identifiers to words, while Victors et al. have designed the Onion Name System, which is a name system that allows onion services to reference themselves with a readable, globally unique identifier.
Despite the difficulties with onion names, the vast majority of services are well worth your time. In fact, most are essential to maintaining your online privacy and ensuring that you’re able to stay informed and speak out against oppressive government regimes or corporate greed.
As the popularity of Tor grows, so too will its need to offer more and better services for its users. This is why the Tor Project is investing in the development of new technologies to improve onion services and their usability. The next generation of onion services will use elliptic curve cryptography to embed the public key in the onion domain, which should greatly increase their usability.