Modeling Structure and Resilience of the Dark Network

Abstract

While the statistical and resilience properties of the Internet are no more changing significantly across time, the Darknet, a network devoted to keep anonymous its traffic, still experiences rapid changes to improve the security of its users. Here, we study the structure of the Darknet and we find that its topology is rather peculiar, being characterized by non-homogenous distribution of connections -- typical of scale-free networks --, very short path lengths and high clustering -- typical of small-world networks -- and lack of a core of highly connected nodes. We propose a model to reproduce such features, demonstrating that the mechanisms used to improve cyber-security are responsible for the observed topology. Unexpectedly, we reveal that its peculiar structure makes the Darknet much more resilient than the Internet -- used as a benchmark for comparison at a descriptive level -- to random failures, targeted attacks and cascade failures, as a result of adaptive changes in response to the attempts of dismantling the network across time.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Cascade control and defense in complex networks
• Navigability of Complex Networks
• Sustaining the Internet with Hyperbolic Mapping
• Prominence and control: The weighted rich-club effect
• Navigating ultrasmall worlds in ultrashort time

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Robustness and resilience of complex networks
• Distance entropy cartography characterises centrality in complex networks
• The fragility of decentralised trustless socio-technical systems
• Generalized Rich-Club Ordering in Networks
• Differences in structure and dynamics of networks retrieved from dark and public web forums
• Critical field-exponents for secure message-passing in modular networks
• Onion under Microscope: An in-depth analysis of the Tor network
• Graph Theoretic Properties of the Darkweb
• The darkweb: a social network anomaly
• Covert Quantum Internet