Almost 97% Of Tor Traffic Goes To 'Normal' Websites

Almost 97% of the traffic that will generate Tor users to 'normal' websites over the internet anyone can visit, according to research from the Tor Project. Tor is a software that allows users not only to hide their IP address, but also makes it possible to visit Tor sites that are only accessible through the Tor network.These are the so-called "hidden services".

The Tor Project wanted to know how many of the Tor traffic goes to these hidden services. For this was the collaboration of several volunteers to share data from their Tor server. This enabled the Tor Project a small proportion (2% - 5%) of activities in hidden view services. Establish on the basis of current calculations, the researchers found that each day 30,000 hidden services are active. These websites generate every day 400 to 600Mbit per second of traffic, which amounts to about 5 terabytes of data per day.

Furthermore, it appears that is the Tor traffic from Tor users to these hidden services 3.4% of the total Tor traffic. This means that 96.6% of the Tor traffic to "normal" websites is that anyone can access through a browser. Tor came last year regularly negative in the news because Tor would mainly be used for visiting criminal Tor sites. Now it appears that the most traffic to websites is that outside Gate to visit.

The researchers suggest that it is still to preliminary results in that regard are established on the basis of a limited data set, and with a grain would have to be taken. The study was conducted over a period of several months, but the researchers plan to expand further in the future. They want to know how many people visit daily Tor sites and how often people try to visit a hidden service that no longer exists.

"Unfortunately, some of these questions with the current reporting infrastructure are not easy to answer, mostly because the collection in this way can reveal hidden information about specific services, as well as the results of the current system include excess  dates." The researchers are also looking at aggregation protocols for statistics that they can use in place of the current system, so they still safe to collect all kinds of statistics.