[tor-talk] Number of onions online

[Nurmi, Juha]

Hi,

The number of onion services is very interesting question. I have been
researching onions in several research projects and I am writing papers
about this.

Meanwhile, TorProject provides excellent onion stats too, see

https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-dir-onions-seen.html
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-statistics-about-onions
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/extrapolating-hidserv-stats-2015-01-31.pdf

This is the best data we have today.

In scientific literature these numbers vary a lot. This is because the
methods some researches have been using are very different.

How researchers have been looking for onion addresses:
- Crawling onion sites
- Looking tor2web proxy stats
- Looking leaked DNS requests (soon impossible)
- DHT spying (this should NOT be done and it's technically impossible in
the future)

Anyway, you are not going to find every existing onion address. In
addition, some onions use so called stealth mode which make them
undetectable.

How researches have been testing these addresses:
- Number of reachable onions over time, for instance, port scan per day and
cumulative stats
- Number of reachable onions in a certain moment, for instance, one scan
- Number of onion sites over time or a certain moment, for instance, wget
to port 80 etc.

Again, there are a lot of onions out there but nobody really knows what
services they are offering.

Regards,
Juha


On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 10:55 PM, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Recent talk in onionland seems to be indicating somewhere
> nearing 10,000 onions online, from spidering and whatnot.
> Are there folks here involved in such projects that can contribute
> further graphs, lists, categorization, and commentary?
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