
A darknet or dark net is an
overlay network
An overlay network is a logical computer network that is protocol layering, layered on top of a physical network. The concept of overlay networking is distinct from the traditional model of OSI model, OSI layered networks, and almost always assum ...
within the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization,
and often uses a unique customized
communication protocol
A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics (computer science), sem ...
. Two typical darknet types are social networks (usually used for
file hosting with a
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...
connection), and
anonymity
Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. Anonymity may be created unintentionally through the loss of identifying information due to the passage of time or a destructive event, or intentionally if a person cho ...
proxy networks such as
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Toronto, Canada
** Toronto Raptors
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor ...
via an anonymized series of connections.
The term "darknet" was popularized by major news outlets and was associated with
Tor Onion services when the infamous drug bazaar
Silk Road
The Silk Road was a network of Asian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over , it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between the ...
used it, despite the terminology being unofficial. Technology such as
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Toronto, Canada
** Toronto Raptors
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor ...
,
I2P, and
Freenet
Hyphanet (until mid-2023: Freenet) is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, Anonymity application, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free soft ...
are intended to defend digital rights by providing security, anonymity, or censorship resistance and are used for both illegal and legitimate reasons. Anonymous communication between
whistle-blowers, activists, journalists and news organisations is also facilitated by darknets through use of applications such as
SecureDrop.
Terminology
The term originally described computers on
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...
that were hidden, programmed to receive messages but not respond to or acknowledge anything, thus remaining invisible and in the dark.
Since
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...
, the usage of dark net has expanded to include
friend-to-friend networks (usually used for
file sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...
with a
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...
connection) and
privacy
Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.
The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...
networks such as Tor.
The reciprocal term for a darknet is a
clearnet or the
surface web when referring to content indexable by search engines.
The term "darknet" is often used
interchangeably with "
dark web
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets ( overlay networks) that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communica ...
" because of the quantity of
hidden services on
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Toronto, Canada
** Toronto Raptors
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor ...
's darknet. Additionally, the term is often inaccurately used interchangeably with the
deep web because of Tor's history as a platform that could not be search-indexed. Mixing uses of both these terms has been described as inaccurate, with some commentators recommending the terms be used in distinct fashions.
Origins
"Darknet" was coined in the 1970s to designate networks isolated from
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...
(the government-founded military/academical network which evolved into the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
), for security purposes.
Darknet addresses could receive data from ARPANET but did not appear in the network lists and would not answer
pings or other inquiries.
The term gained public acceptance following publication of "The Darknet and the Future of
Content Distribution", a 2002 paper by
Peter Biddle
Peter Nicholas Biddle (born December 22, 1966) is a technology evangelist from the United States. His primary fields of interest while employed at major technology companies such as Intel and Microsoft were content distribution, secure computi ...
, Paul England, Marcus Peinado, and Bryan Willman, four employees of
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
who argued the presence of the darknet was the primary hindrance to the development of workable
digital rights management
Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...
(DRM) technologies and made
copyright infringement
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of Copyright#Scope, works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the c ...
inevitable. This paper described "darknet" more generally as any type of parallel network that is encrypted or requires a specific protocol to allow a user to connect to it.
Sub-cultures
Journalist
J. D. Lasica, in his 2005 book ''Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation'', described the darknet's reach encompassing file sharing networks. Subsequently, in 2014, journalist
Jamie Bartlett in his book ''The Dark Net'' used the term to describe a range of underground and emergent
subculture
A subculture is a group of people within a culture, cultural society that differentiates itself from the values of the conservative, standard or dominant culture to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures ...
s, including
camgirls,
cryptoanarchists,
darknet drug markets,
self harm communities,
social media
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
racists, and
transhumanists.
Uses
Darknets in general may be used for various reasons, such as:
* To better protect the
privacy
Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.
The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...
rights of citizens from
targeted and
mass
Mass is an Intrinsic and extrinsic properties, intrinsic property of a physical body, body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the physical quantity, quantity of matter in a body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physi ...
surveillance
*
Computer crime
Cybercrime encompasses a wide range of criminal activities that are carried out using digital devices and/or networks. It has been variously defined as "a crime committed on a computer network, especially the Internet"; Cybercriminals may exp ...
(cracking, file corruption, etc.)
* Protecting
dissident
A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 2 ...
s from political reprisal
*
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...
(
warez
Warez refers to pirated software and other copyrighted digital media—such as video games, movies, music, and e-books—illegally distributed online, often after bypassing digital rights management (DRM). The term, derived from “software wa ...
, personal files, pornography, confidential files, illegal or counterfeit software, etc.)
* Sale of restricted goods on
darknet market
A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor and I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, ...
s
*
Whistleblowing
Whistleblowing (also whistle-blowing or whistle blowing) is the activity of a person, often an employee, revealing information about activity within a private or public organization that is deemed illegal, immoral, illicit, unsafe, unethical or ...
and
news leak
A news leak is the unsanctioned release of confidential information to news media. It can also be the premature publication of information by a news outlet, of information that it has agreed not to release before a specified time, in violation of a ...
s
* Purchase or sale of illicit or illegal goods or services
*
Circumventing network censorship and
content-filtering systems, or bypassing restrictive
firewall
Firewall may refer to:
* Firewall (computing), a technological barrier designed to prevent unauthorized or unwanted communications between computer networks or hosts
* Firewall (construction), a barrier inside a building, designed to limit the spre ...
policies
Software
All darknets require specific software installed or network configurations made to access them, such as
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Toronto, Canada
** Toronto Raptors
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor ...
, which can be accessed via a customized browser from
Vidalia (aka the Tor browser bundle), or alternatively via a
proxy configured to perform the same function.
Active
Tor is the most popular instance of a darknet,
and it is often mistakenly thought to be the only online tool that facilitates access to darknets.

Alphabetical list:
*
anoNet is a decentralized friend-to-friend network built using
VPN
Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...
and software
BGP
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous system (Internet), autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vect ...
routers.
*
Decentralized network 42 (not for anonymity but research purposes).
*
Freenet
Hyphanet (until mid-2023: Freenet) is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, Anonymity application, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free soft ...
is a popular
DHT file hosting darknet platform. It supports
friend-to-friend and
opennet modes.
*
GNUnet can be utilized as a darknet if the "
F2F (network) topology" option is enabled.
*
I2P (Invisible Internet Project) is an
overlay proxy network that features hidden services called "
Eepsites".
*
IPFS has a browser extension that may backup popular webpages.
*
RetroShare is a
friend-to-friend messenger communication and file transfer platform. It may be used as a darknet if
DHT and Discovery features are disabled.
*
Riffle
A riffle is a shallow landform in a flowing channel. Colloquially, it is a shallow place in a river where water flows quickly past rocks. However, in geology a riffle has specific characteristics.
Topographic, sedimentary and hydraulic indica ...
is a government, client-server darknet system that simultaneously provides secure anonymity (as long as at least one server remains uncompromised), efficient computation, and minimal bandwidth burden.
*
Secure Scuttlebutt is a peer-to peer communication protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media ecosystem
*
Syndie is
software
Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications.
The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...
used to publish
distributed Distribution may refer to:
Mathematics
*Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations
*Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a varia ...
forums over the anonymous networks of I2P, Tor and Freenet.
*
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Toronto, Canada
** Toronto Raptors
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor ...
(The onion router) is an
anonymity
Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. Anonymity may be created unintentionally through the loss of identifying information due to the passage of time or a destructive event, or intentionally if a person cho ...
network that also features a darknet – via its
onion services.
*
Tribler
Tribler is an open source decentralized BitTorrent client which allows anonymous peer-to-peer by default. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching.
Due to this overlay network, Tribler do ...
is an anonymous BitTorrent client with built in search engine, and non-
web
Web most often refers to:
* Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal
* World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system
Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to:
Computing
* WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
, worldwide publishing through channels.
*
Urbit is a federated system of personal servers in a peer-to-peer overlay network.
*
Zeronet is a
DHT Web 2.0 hosting with
Tor
Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to:
Places
* Toronto, Canada
** Toronto Raptors
* Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain
* Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city
* Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano
* Tor Bay, Devon, England
* Tor ...
users.
No longer supported
*
StealthNet (discontinued)
*
WASTE
Waste are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor Value (economics), economic value. A wast ...
Defunct
*
AllPeers
*
Turtle F2F
See also
*
BlackBook (social network)
*
Crypto-anarchism
*
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it.
Individual coin ownership record ...
*
Darknet market
A darknet market is a commercial website on the dark web that operates via darknets such as Tor and I2P. They function primarily as black markets, selling or brokering transactions involving drugs, cyber-arms, weapons, counterfeit currency, ...
*
Dark web
The dark web is the World Wide Web content that exists on darknets ( overlay networks) that use the Internet but require specific software, configurations, or authorization to access. Through the dark web, private computer networks can communica ...
*
Deep web
*
Private peer-to-peer (P2P)
*
Sneakernet
Sneakernet, also called sneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives between computers, rathe ...
*
Virtual private network
Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not con ...
(VPN)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Darknet (networking)
File sharing
Virtual private networks
Darknet markets
Cyberspace
Internet terminology
Dark web
Network architecture
Distributed computing architecture
1970s neologisms
*
Internet architecture