Assessing the Health of the Dark Web: An Analysis of Dark Web Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

A hidden part of the World Wide Web is known as the Dark Web, featuring websites that cannot be indexed by traditional search engines. Many open source software products are used to access and navigate through the Dark Web. Together they form the Dark Web open source software ecosystem. Research on this ecosystem is scarce and research on the ecosystem health is non-existent, even though ecosystem health is an useful indicator of the livelihood of an ecosystem. The goal of this research is to evaluate the health of the ecosystem through an assessment of Tor, I2P and GitHub. The Open Source Ecosystem Health Operationalization framework is used to help perform this assessment. Eight metrics from the framework are selected, which are measured using the data collected. Analysis of Tor and I2P metrics suggest that there has been an increase in Tor and I2P user activity in the recent past. Added knowledge, spin offs and forks and usage indicate active participation and interest in Tor and I2P. There has also been an increase in the number of active GitHub Dark Web projects. However, these GitHub projects are not well-connected and only a small number of projects have a large number of contributors. There is some variety among the GitHub software projects. The framework proves to be adequately capable of determining the health of the Dark Web open source ecosystem with the available data.