A Big Data Architecture for Early Identification and Categorization of Dark Web Sites

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pastor-Galindo, Javier, Sandlin, Hông-Ân, Mármol, Félix Gómez, Bovet, Gérôme, Pérez, Gregorio Martínez
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pastor-Galindo, Javier
Sandlin, Hông-Ân
Mármol, Félix Gómez
Bovet, Gérôme
Pérez, Gregorio Martínez
author_facet Pastor-Galindo, Javier
Sandlin, Hông-Ân
Mármol, Félix Gómez
Bovet, Gérôme
Pérez, Gregorio Martínez
contents The dark web has become notorious for its association with illicit activities and there is a growing need for systems to automate the monitoring of this space. This paper proposes an end-to-end scalable architecture for the early identification of new Tor sites and the daily analysis of their content. The solution is built using an Open Source Big Data stack for data serving with Kubernetes, Kafka, Kubeflow, and MinIO, continuously discovering onion addresses in different sources (threat intelligence, code repositories, web-Tor gateways, and Tor repositories), downloading the HTML from Tor and deduplicating the content using MinHash LSH, and categorizing with the BERTopic modeling (SBERT embedding, UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN document clustering and c-TF-IDF topic keywords). In 93 days, the system identified 80,049 onion services and characterized 90% of them, addressing the challenge of Tor volatility. A disproportionate amount of repeated content is found, with only 6.1% unique sites. From the HTML files of the dark sites, 31 different low-topics are extracted, manually labeled, and grouped into 11 high-level topics. The five most popular included sexual and violent content, repositories, search engines, carding, cryptocurrencies, and marketplaces. During the experiments, we identified 14 sites with 13,946 clones that shared a suspiciously similar mirroring rate per day, suggesting an extensive common phishing network. Among the related works, this study is the most representative characterization of onion services based on topics to date.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_13320
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Big Data Architecture for Early Identification and Categorization of Dark Web Sites
Pastor-Galindo, Javier
Sandlin, Hông-Ân
Mármol, Félix Gómez
Bovet, Gérôme
Pérez, Gregorio Martínez
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Information Retrieval
The dark web has become notorious for its association with illicit activities and there is a growing need for systems to automate the monitoring of this space. This paper proposes an end-to-end scalable architecture for the early identification of new Tor sites and the daily analysis of their content. The solution is built using an Open Source Big Data stack for data serving with Kubernetes, Kafka, Kubeflow, and MinIO, continuously discovering onion addresses in different sources (threat intelligence, code repositories, web-Tor gateways, and Tor repositories), downloading the HTML from Tor and deduplicating the content using MinHash LSH, and categorizing with the BERTopic modeling (SBERT embedding, UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN document clustering and c-TF-IDF topic keywords). In 93 days, the system identified 80,049 onion services and characterized 90% of them, addressing the challenge of Tor volatility. A disproportionate amount of repeated content is found, with only 6.1% unique sites. From the HTML files of the dark sites, 31 different low-topics are extracted, manually labeled, and grouped into 11 high-level topics. The five most popular included sexual and violent content, repositories, search engines, carding, cryptocurrencies, and marketplaces. During the experiments, we identified 14 sites with 13,946 clones that shared a suspiciously similar mirroring rate per day, suggesting an extensive common phishing network. Among the related works, this study is the most representative characterization of onion services based on topics to date.
title A Big Data Architecture for Early Identification and Categorization of Dark Web Sites
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13320