[metrics-team] How large is the Tor-network

[Iain Learmonth]

Hi,

Forgot to CC the original sender, who is not subscribed to the list.

On 26/02/2019 15:58, Iain Learmonth wrote:
> Hi Leon,
> 
> You've contacted a list that is primarily used for discussion about the
> development of Tor Metrics software, and you'll probably get more
> answers from the tor-talk at lists.torproject.org mailing list instead.
> I will however answer your questions.

(I realized I made a mistake here, I had meant tor-talk@ and not
tor-project at . Corrected inline.)

> On 26/02/2019 10:13, Leon Hoekstra wrote:
>> I’ve read that the surface web is only 5% of the total internet. The deep web should be the largest part of the internet, people say. And a part of the deep web there is a layer thats been called the dark web with has a few different kind of networks like I2P, Freenet, Open bazaar and off course the largest network of these, the Tor-network. 
>>
>> My question is, when the surface web should be 5%, how much of the 95% would be covered by the Tor-network?
> My guess is that you've seen a picture of an iceberg alongside these
> statistics? There is some truth to the idea of a surface web and a deep
> web, and there's also a lot of sensationalism.
> 
> Let's start with some definitions:
> 
> The "surface web": Things you can Google, generally available to the
> public via a browser. This excludes anything you need to log in to see.
> Wikipedia would be in here along with many news outlets. Google search
> results would be in here too, which is an interesting question: Do
> Google search results pages that are dynamically generated count towards
> the size of the surface web or is it only static content?
> 
> The "deep web": Anything you need to log in to see. This is all the
> posts on Facebook, news articles behind paywalls, scientific journals,
> records in your human resources system, medical databases, corporate
> intranets, etc. There is a scale here with regard to how public you want
> this stuff to be and there are very legitimate reasons for hiding some
> content behind a login.
> 
> The "dark web": Anything you cannot access with an ordinary browser
> would be a popular definition. This would include onion services,
> corporate intranets that need you to connect via VPN, IoT networks, I2P,
> Freenet, etc. Some of these offer anonymity properties, some strong
> authentication and some just offer robust access.
> 
> The picture isn't so clear now. Depending on who you ask a corporate VPN
> might be in the "deep web" category because you have to login to see it,
> but I believe really it's in the "dark web" category because you need
> specialized software to access it (the VPN client). You also have
> Tor2Web instances which make Onion services available to the public
> Internet so maybe they are just "deep web" and not "dark web".
> 
> Perhaps even the distinction is the wrong one to be making, an
> oversimplification, and really we should be talking about the security
> properties that are provided or required for access.
> 
> Let's get to some numbers:
> 
> Assuming that traffic consumed is a proxy measurement for "size"
> ~150GBit/s traffic is consumed daily in the Tor network
> ~1.7 GBit/s traffic is consumed daily in the Tor network for Onion services
> ~98.9% of total Tor traffic is for "surface web"
> ~1.1% of total Tor traffic is for Onion services
> 
> https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html
> https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.html
> 
> I would guess the most likely explanation for this number being so low
> is that the 95% number has been made up just to scare people. Users of
> Tor Browser are just ordinary people that want the security, anonymity
> and privacy properties.
> 
> Thanks,
> Iain.
> 
> 
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