Exploring the availability, protocols and advertising of Tor v3 domains

This study analyzes the availability of Tor onion services over time, as they have a limited lifetime and can be activated and deactivated intermittently. Various onion services use different protocols, which are analyzed, including 15 in total. The presence of tor links in online resources for advertising is also characterized. Having collected 54,602 onion addresses for 6 months, the experimental analysis shows that 23.65% were dead and 76.35% were alive, of which 32.74% were deactivated and activated at some point in a window of 31 days. In terms of protocols, HTTP was observed to be predominant, followed by SSH and SMTP. In advertising, 49.72% of the links are found on the surface, 5.79% on the dark, and 44.49% on both, finding a large number of link aggregator repositories.