Systems methodology to characterizing the threat posed by anonymous systems on the internet

Government agencies, researchers, and developers have worked to build distributed networks and systems enabling anonymous communication on the Internet. Within the last ten years, the maturation of these systems have enhanced the effectiveness and availability of anonymous communication, allowing criminals to electronically participate in illicit activities such as money laundering, child pornography, and terrorism, without fear of being exposed. The goal of this project is to help combat cyber crime by offering law enforcement agencies an overview of the current state of these networks and their capabilities. Additionally, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of the TOR network and its Web of hidden services available to TOR users. The results of this analysis show a small number of hidden services compared to the growing user population of the network suggesting TOR is being for anonymous browsing on the World Wide Web. Future research should focus on analyzing exit node traffic from the network to other places on the Internet.