OT: The Dark Web

[grimly4]

Remember a few months ago, a poster was asking about the Dark Web and how he'd find it? I wonder if he was another journo expecting us to do his work for him

- we've seen that before. Anyway, something seems to have borne fruit... Radio Five Live Sunday evening, 9pm

's an old story... I recall installing a freenet server,

in the hope it would facilitate access to information for those censored Chinese folks, but didn't bother to install it after an upgrade, perhaps it's just as well, if feckers are using it to buy drugs and guns. Of course, the whole thing might be the usual journalistic bollocks.

[Jules Richardson]

They'll be banging on about bitcoins again any minute...

[hugh]

BBC news channel today

[Brian Gaff]

Well everything one invents or supplies can be used for both good and bad, and often the definition of good or bad is culturally determined. There are parts of the old Soviet union where you re not allowed to visit huge numbers of sites outside the country. Bella Russ, which I cannot spell comes to mind. Brian

[David WE Roberts]

This made me wonder what really makes something 'dark'.

Not publishing your domain name via the global DNS service will take you 'ex directory'. However, phone users who are ex-directory still get cold calls from people who just work their way up a telephone number range with an auto-dialler. Presumably web crawlers could do the same with IP ranges.

To be truly dark you would not have to respond to any incoming query from any IP address you don't recognise. Probably your routers would also have to have routing tables based on IP addresses you are prepared to talk to and with no automatic sharing of information about the managed address space. Doesn't sound hard - if you add in a firewall or two and a DMZ then a darknet is just another corporate intranet open only to those who know about it and are authorised to access it. Link a few ot these with heavily encrypted VPNs and no average punter will know you are there - however the presence of a VPN is a dead giveaway that something is happening. Hardest thing is probably to get your traffic routed along the major backbones if they decide to filter out 'unsanitised' IP address ranges.

Does that make the average home network, hidden behind a NAT router, a mini darknet?

Cheers

Dave R

[John Rumm]

You can hide the presence of the VPN using a "port knocking" technique. i.e. the VPN access is basically hidden behind the firewall as well. It only opens when a client attempts connections on the correct pre-agreed sequence of TCP ports first.

[David WE Roberts]

I was thinking more of traffic analysis showing encrypted traffic between two endpoints, although skipping between ports (and even IP addresses) might make this more difficult.