Srikoshetilo: the number of hidden services .onion increased one and a half times in 3 days

For three days this week, the number of hidden services on the Tor network suddenly increased from 40 thousand to 60 thousand. This is evidenced by internal network statistics available on the project website. It is not yet known exactly who and for what purpose urgently needed to raise 20,000 hidden sites.

The network has not yet known such sudden bursts. Of course, this could be explained by a change in the calculation system for hidden sites, but according to experts , this system is quite transparent, works well, and could hardly be subjected to such a sharp adjustment.
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Interestingly, the abrupt appearance of thousands of new hidden services not only did not cause an increase in the volume of network traffic, but also coincided with its some (insignificant) decrease.



It is possible that such a surge is caused by the stormy activity of the safe messenger Ricochet . This messenger with message encryption is developed by members of the Tor team. One of the interesting features of OTR is the lack of binding a specific user to a particular conversation. Chats do not have a digital signature — and while you’re talking to you, you’re sure that you’re communicating with the right person, anyone can create a set of messages that look like messages between any two users of the program. And if so, then it is impossible to prove that you were the one who led the particular conversation.

This assumption confirms the fact that 5 days ago, developers reported on the successful completion of an audit performed by British security experts from the NCC Group . Experts praised the security of the messenger. The vulnerability they found that could lead to the deanonimization of Ricochet was fixed in his latest release .

John Brooks, the head of the Ricochet project, explained that the project’s goal is to provide secure, encrypted communication in which you don’t need to trust any intermediaries. This task is perfectly solved by the hidden Tor services. “Each Ricochet client is a hidden service, and your identifier is the .onion address. It is for him that others can reach you, ”Brooks explained.

It is doubtful that in a few days the messenger could gain about 20,000 new users. Either this is some kind of a planned action, or an automatic check from developers who create bots for network load testing.