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Type of site | Social network |
|---|---|
| Available in | Multiple |
| URL | facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjj biltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion  (Accessing link help) [1] [2] |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Yes |
| Users | >1,000,000/month (as of April 2016 [update] ) [3] |
The Facebook onion address located at facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion [2] [1] (formerly facebookcorewwwi.onion) is a site that allows access to Facebook through the Tor protocol, using its .onion top-level domain. [3] [4]
Prior to the release of an official .onion domain, accessing Facebook through Tor would sometimes lead to error messages and inability to access the website. [3] ProPublica explicitly referenced the existence of Facebook's .onion site when they started their own onion service. [5]
The site also makes it easier for Facebook to differentiate between accounts that have been caught up in a botnet and those that legitimately access Facebook through Tor. [6] As of its 2014 release, the site was still in early stages, with much work remaining to polish the code for Tor access. It has been speculated that other companies will follow suit and release their own Tor-accessible sites. [6]
In October 2014, Facebook announced [7] that users could connect to the website through a Tor onion service using the privacy-protecting Tor browser and encrypted using HTTPS. [8] [9] [10] Announcing the feature, Alec Muffett said "Facebook's onion address provides a way to access Facebook through Tor without losing the cryptographic protections provided by the Tor cloud. ... it provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a Facebook datacentre." [8] The network address it used at the time – facebookcorewwwi.onion – is a backronym that stands for Facebook's Core WWW Infrastructure. [7]
In April 2016, it had been used by over 1 million people monthly, up from 525,000 in 2015. [3] Google does not operate sites through Tor, and Facebook has been applauded for allowing such access, [11] which makes it available in countries that actively try to block Facebook. [12]
In May 2021 it updated to an onion version 3 address at facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion. [1] [2] This was due to the Tor Project's planned July 2021 deprecation of v2 addresses due to their inherent crackability using brute-force attacks by modern hardware that did not exist at the time of their introduction (many private keys are known to equal the same v2 address due to a hash collision). [13]
Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The protocol is therefore also referred to as HTTP over TLS, or HTTP over SSL.
In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. It improves privacy, security, and performance in the process.
A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.
.onion is a special-use top level domain name designating an anonymous onion service, which was formerly known as a "hidden service", reachable via the Tor network. Such addresses are not actual DNS names, and the .onion TLD is not in the Internet DNS root, but with the appropriate proxy software installed, Internet programs such as web browsers can access sites with .onion addresses by sending the request through the Tor network.
HTTP cookies are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user's device during a session.
TorChat was a peer-to-peer anonymous instant messenger that used Tor onion services as its underlying network. It provided cryptographically secure text messaging and file transfers. The characteristics of Tor's onion services ensure that all traffic between the clients is encrypted and that it is very difficult to tell who is communicating with whom and where a given client is physically located.
Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays.
DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy. The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates. Subsequent products include extensions for popular web browsers and a new web browser.
Orbot is a free proxy app that provides anonymity on the Internet for users of the Android and iOS operating systems. It allows traffic from apps such as web browsers, email clients, map programs, and others to be routed via the Tor network.
Tor Mail was a Tor hidden service that went offline in August 2013 after an FBI raid on Freedom Hosting. The service allowed users to send and receive email anonymously to email addresses inside and outside the Tor network.
The Guardian Project is a global collective of software developers, designers, advocates, activists, and trainers who develop open-source mobile security software and operating system enhancements. They also create customized mobile devices to help individuals communicate more freely and protect themselves from intrusion and monitoring. The effort specifically focuses on users who live or work in high-risk situations and who often face constant surveillance and intrusion attempts into their mobile devices and communication streams.
SecureDrop is a free software platform for secure communication between journalists and sources (whistleblowers). It was originally designed and developed by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen under the name DeadDrop. James Dolan also co-created the software.
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 communicate and conduct business anonymously without divulging identifying information, such as a user's location. The dark web forms a small part of the deep web, the part of the web not indexed by web search engines, although sometimes the term deep web is mistakenly used to refer specifically to the dark web.
Alec David Edward Muffett is an Anglo-American internet security expert and software engineer. His work includes Crack, the original password cracker for Unix, and for the CrackLib password-integrity testing library. He is active in the open-source software community.
Tor2web is a software project to allow Tor hidden services to be accessed from a standard browser without being connected to the Tor network. It was created by Aaron Swartz and Virgil Griffith.
Proton Mail is a Swiss end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2013 headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland. It uses client-side encryption to protect email content and user data before they are sent to Proton Mail servers, unlike other common email providers such as Gmail and Outlook.com. The service can be accessed through a webmail client, the Tor network, or dedicated iOS and Android apps.
Parrot OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian with a focus on security, privacy, and development.
Grams is a discontinued search engine for Tor based darknet markets launched in April 2014, and closed in December 2017. The service allowed users to search multiple darknet markets for products like drugs and guns from a simple search interface, and also provided the capability for its users to hide their transactions through its bitcoin tumbler Helix.
SIGAINT was a Tor hidden service offering secure email services. According to its FAQ page, its web interface used SquirrelMail which does not rely on JavaScript. Passwords couldn't be recovered. Users received two addresses per inbox: one at sigaint.org for receiving clearnet emails and the other at its .onion address only for receiving emails sent from other Tor-enabled email services. Free accounts had 50 MB of storage space and expired after one year of inactivity. Upgraded accounts had access to POP3, IMAP, SMTP, larger size limits, full disk encryption, and never expired.
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