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

, 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

, 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

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

'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

(the government-founded military/academical network which evolved into the

), 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

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

, 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. Geographies of Tor

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). *

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. *

(The onion router) is an

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

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

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