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@article{178646,
        author = {Shreyas Gowda S and Praveen Pawaskar and Nishant Satish Naik and S Surya Narayanan and Kavya Jaishree and Rahul K},
        title = {De-anonymizing of entities on the onion sites operating on TOR Network},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2025},
        volume = {11},
        number = {12},
        pages = {4338-4345},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=178646},
        abstract = {Onion services and Tor facilitates anonymous communication, giving users and service operators added privacy. Nevertheless, the problems of Tor anonymity impact cyber security and law enforcement, especially when such services are used for illegal purposes. In this paper, we propose a two-stage API-based approach for the de-anonymizing of actors on onion sites. Initially, we utilized an IP intelligence API to find possible IP addresses that could be linked to specific onion services. Next, these IP addresses were checked against a threat intelligence database through another API to confirm that these IP addresses were flagged on blacklists associated with spam, malware, and cybercrime. This allowed for the linkage of concealed traffic data with recognizable and potentially hazardous entities. Our results demonstrate that in the Tor ecosystem, critical information can be exposed due to misconfiguration, exit node behavior, and dependency on external services. We discuss the ethical ramifications of this work while providing principles intended for responsible de-anonymizing action conducted on non-legitimate domains of anonymity. This work highlights the enduring controversy over the extent of digital privacy and security.},
        keywords = {},
        month = {May},
        }