Professional Documents
Culture Documents
https://doi.org/10.7880/abas.0200908a
Received: September 8, 2020; accepted: October 16, 2020
Published in advance on J-STAGE: December 5, 2020
a)
Faculty of Economics and Management, Surugadai University. 698 Azu, Hanno, Saitama,
Japan. hatta.masayuki@surugadai.ac.jp
A version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2020 Summer (Hatta, 2020b).
© 2020 Masayuki Hatta. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Introduction
In recent years, the term “dark web” has become popular. The dark
web, i.e., a World Wide Web wherein your anonymity is guaranteed
and one that cannot be accessed without using special software, was,
until recently, of interest to only a few curious people. However, in
2011, the world’s largest online black market, Silk Road (Bolton,
2017), was established on the dark web; with the presence of virtual
currencies, which incorporate the anonymity provided on the dark
web (Todorof, 2019), it has become a topic of economic and business
research. Words similar to “dark web” (such as “deep web” and “dark
net”) are used in the same context, but they are completely different
technical concepts; this leads to confusion.
Deep Web
Historically, among the three terms (“dark web,” “deep web,” and
“dark net”), the term “deep web” was the first to emerge. Computer
technician and entrepreneur, Michael K. Bergman, first used it in his
white paper “The deep web: Surfacing hidden value” (Bergman,
2001). Bergman likened web searches to the fishing industry and
stated that legacy search engines were nothing more than fishing
nets being dragged along the surface of the sea, even though there is
a lot of important information deep in the sea, where the nets do not
reach. Therefore, he stated that, moving forward, it was important to
reach deep areas as well. This was the advent of the deep web.
Bergman stated that the deep web was 400–550 times larger than
the normal web, and that the information found in the deep web was
1,000–2,000 times the quality of the normal web. The problem is that
even now this is used in the context of the dark web. What Bergman
(2001) first raised as detailed examples of the “deep” web were the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and
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Deep web, dark web, dark net
Dark Net
The term “dark net” became popular at virtually the same time as
the term “dark web” did. There is a hypothesis that this has been
used since the 1970s and although even today, in concrete terms, an
IP address that is not allocated to a host computer is referred to as
the dark net, the trigger for it being used as a general term as it is
now was in 2002 (published in 2003), when a paper was written by
four engineers including Peter Biddle (he was working at Microsoft at
that time), who called the dark net as the future of content
distribution (Biddle, England, Peinado, & Willman, 2003).
Sweeping the world at that time was the P2P file sharing service
software Napster service (started in 1999) and Gnutella (released in
2000). Operation of File Rogue started at around the same time in
Japan. There were fears of copyright infringement, and in the paper
written as part of the research on Digital Rights Management (DRM)
and copy protection (Biddle et al., 2003), the term “dark net” was
clearly being used in the negative meaning of illegal activity.
Biddle et al. (2003) broadly defined dark net as “a collection of
networks and technologies used to share digital content” (Biddle et
al., 2003, p. 155). Based on this, it can be summarized as follows.
(1) This started with the manual carrying of physical media such
as CDs, DVDs, and more recently, USB memory—the
so-called “Sneakernet.”
(2) With the spread of the Internet, files such as music files began
to be stored on one server, giving birth to the “central server”
model. However, if the central server were destroyed, that
would be the end.
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Deep web, dark web, dark net
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1 The term F2Fitself was invented in the year 2000 (Bricklin, 2000).
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Deep web, dark web, dark net
Overlay network
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Deep web, dark web, dark net
Dark Web
It is unclear when the dark web first appeared. The term dark web
began to be used around 2009, but merging with the deep web was
already seen at that time (Becket, 2009). To understand the dark web,
which is different from the deep web and dark net (which are
comparatively simple, technologically), an understanding of
computer network basics is required.
Internet basics
page here” from the computer of the viewer is sent to the web server
on the server side in accordance with the fixed rules (known as
“protocols”). The web server receiving this message then sends the
requested data.
At this time, the message is minutely subdivided into data of a fixed
size, called “packets,” in which data called a “header” (wherein
control information such as the IP address of the sender and
destination is described at the start of each header fragment) is
attached, are exchanged. The side receiving the packet connects and
reconstructs the message and takes action accordingly.
On the Internet, such packets are sent in a packet relay via many
server machines to the destination server. This type of packet flow is
called “traffic.” Looking at the header and deciding where and how to
send the packet is known as “routing,” and the general name given to
devices and software that make these decisions and transmit these
packets is “routers.”
The log is often stored on the server side for a fixed period of time
(in many cases, from three months to one year or more). Therefore, if
the investigatory body receives submission of a log from the body
managing the server or ISP, etc., they can start to track down the
sender. Of course, there are issues with freedom of expression and
secrecy of communications, so even investigatory authorities are
unable to acquire sender information in an unlimited way. However,
in cases involving requests for disclosure of sender information based
on the Law on Restrictions on the Liability for Damages of Specified
Telecommunications Service Providers, identification of information
senders by the police or the prosecution after acquiring a warrant
from the courts is an everyday occurrence.
Therefore, there are systems, such as Tor, that make it difficult for
information senders to be identified. Tor is software designed to
enable Internet users to communicate while maintaining anonymity
and has been named based on the initial letters for “The Onion
Router.” Tor is an open-source software that runs on various
platforms2 and can be freely obtained by anyone (and is often free of
charge). In recent years, the development of Tor has been furthered
on a volunteer basis. Originally, however, this technology was
developed at a US-navy laboratory at the start of the1990s.
Tor adds a tweak to the basic mechanism of data exchange over the
normal Internet. Tor constructs a virtual network over the Internet
and functions as a special router over this network. This is a unique
form of routing and, as the name suggests, it uses a type of
technology known as “onion routing.”
For example, in the same way that if the destination on postal
items is written in a code, mail will not be delivered, the sender IP
2 For the development process of Open source software, refer to Hatta (2018,
2020a), etc.
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It is determined that the packet is sent using this route. (Tor node
C is the terminal point on the virtual network created by Tor, and as
this is a connecting point that reconnects to the Internet, in
particular, this is referred to as an exit node.)
Figure 4. Onion
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Deep web, dark web, dark net
Conclusion
In this paper, we have provided a simple explanation of the
deep web, dark web, and (two) dark nets, including their technical
aspects. These concepts, as shown in Table 1, are easy to understand
based on what each one is the opposite of. Discussions of the dark
web, etc., tend to be hampered by the image that the word
presents. When researching this, moving forward, a precise
understanding based on its historical and technical nature is
required.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Publication of
Scientific Research Results, Grant Number JP16HP2004.
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