Analyzing Darknet Traffic: Examining how Tor Modifications Affect Onion Service Traffic Classification

The important work of classifying network traffic for control and monitoring is examined in this study. Data protection has taken centre stage as privacy concerns have grown over the last two decades. Online privacy is possible through the Tor network, which is well-known for enabling Onion Services and offering user anonymity. But the abuse of this anonymity—especially with Onion Services—has prompted the government to work on de-anonymizing users. In this work, we address three main goals: first, we achieve over 99% accuracy in distinguishing Onion Service traffic from other Tor traf- fic; second, we assess how well our methods perform in the event that Tor traffic is modified to hide information leaks; and third, we detect the utmost significant article integrations for our classification task. This study tackles issues related to privacy challenges and misuse concerns in network traffic analysis.