Recent research analysing the structure of the Darknet in comparison with the Internet reveals that the former is, in fact, more robust against factors such as security breaches or systemic instabilities than the Internet. The analysis shows this is because of its peculiar topology that is different from that of the Internet. The Darknet’s lack of a “rich club”-like core of highly connected nodes is one aspect that renders it robust against random crashes, targeted attacks and also cascading effects of failures of core nodes. This research is to be published in Physical Review E. “Internet is highly centralized around hubs, [has] highly connected nodes which are very interconnected each other. The Darknet is highly decentralized: we did not find a core of hubs. This [requires] much more effort to dismantle the network,” says Manlio De Domenico, an author of the paper, in an email.
The alter ego
The Internet and the Darknet have formed the subject of much research, especially regarding the higher robustness of the latter network. First created in the early 1990s by the US agencies – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research – the Darknet is both resistant to eavesdropping and traffic analysis.
The Internet that we all know so well and can access using search engines like Google or Bing constitutes just a small fraction of the total of overlay networks; there is also the Darknet, the Internet’s alter ego, which consists of the Web’s non-indexed parts that cannot be accessed by search engines. What is more, this Darknet can be accessed only using onion routers like Tor or The Freenet Project– which are special browsers that ensure anonymity of the surfer as well as the service provider. While this is used by defence establishments for passing on sensitive and classified information, it is also, for instance, used by journalists who require utmost secrecy. Certainly it has a sinister side, with criminals also making full use of this technology.
From a network point of view, the structure of the Darknet is very different from that of the Internet. While in the Internet nodes that are central tend to connect more with each other, forming a “rich club” it is not the case in the Darknet. The centralised structure of the Internet makes it more vulnerable to attacks, because by hitting at the central nodes, one can destabilize the entire system. This can’t be done with the Darknet which has a decentralised structure.
Dynamical instability
The Internet crashed for the first time in 1980 when it hosted thousands of users. The crash was due to a cascading effect of a mistake that originated in one router and not due to an attack on a central node.
This sort of cascade can propagate more easily through a network with rich club nodes, than a decentralised Darknet type structure.
Explaining the strength of the Darknet, Dr De Domenico says, “The fact that its network is highly decentralized makes [it] more efficient: if a node crashes, the load is redistributed almost equally among other nodes, with no super-nodes overloaded. This is true at the beginning of the process, and it is not the case with the Internet (where if a hub fails, it is likely to redistribute its load to other hubs thus overloading them).”
The researchers also predict that the Darknet is undergoing a transition from decentralised to centralised structure, based on observations over a span of a few years. This remains, however, to be checked by future studies.
