Since 2011, Carnegie Mellon University has been involved in research on online anonymous marketplaces (also referred to as "dark web markets," "onion markets," "cryptomarkets..."), which has resulted in a number of publications [1,2,3,5,6,7,8], and contributions to larger pieces [4].

This website provides a visualization and query interface to our data. Instructions and frequently asked questions are here.
The actual database(s) behind this website can be obtained from IMPACT CyberTrust. Registration is free.

We offer to the general public:

In addition, eligible parties can request, through IMPACT, the full, non-anonymized data for all datasets. Requests for full, non-anonymized datasets, are handled on a case-by-case basis, and require the signature of a memorandum of agreement. Please refer to the IMPACT CyberTrust website for more information (eligibility, usage restriction, etc).

Upcoming data

As of May 2019, we are not collecting new data at Carnegie Mellon. The project has been spun out to a commercial entity, Hikari Labs, which offers access to much more recent data on a subscription basis.

This website, and the associated data, will however remain permanently available. Older data that we had not previously used might also be made available. A good example is our Hansa data, which we just used in a 2022 paper [8], and released at that time.

Contributors and contact information

Contributors to this project (in alphabetic order) are: Nicolas Christin, Alejandro Cuevas, Kyle Soska, and Jeremy Thomas.

Please contact the PI, Nicolas Christin <nicolasc@cmu.edu>, if you have any questions.

Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Science and Technology (Cyber Security Division), under agreement numbers FA8750-17-2-0188 and FA8750-20-1-1003, and contract number N66001-13-C-0131 (jointly supported by the Government of Australia and SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific), by CyLab at Carnegie Mellon under grant DAAD19-02-1-0389 from the Army Research Office; by the National Science Foundation under ITR award CCF-0424422 (TRUST), and CNS-1223762; and by the Singapore Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) under agreement CNZ2000832.

References

[1] Nicolas Christin. Traveling the Silk Road: A measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace. In Proceedings of the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'13). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. May 2013.
[2] Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin. Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem. In Proceedings of the 24th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'15), pages 33-48. Washington, DC. August 2015.
[3] James Martin and Nicolas Christin. Ethics in Cryptomarket Research. In International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 35, Issue 6, pages 84-91. 2016.
[4] European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and Europol. Drugs and the Darknet: Perspectives for Enforcement, Research and Policy. EMCDDA–Europol Joint publications, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. November 2017.
[5] Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, Kevin Lee, Henry Heffan, Shashvat Srivastava, Kyle Hogan, Jason Hennessey, Andrew Miller, Arvind Narayanan, and Nicolas Christin. An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain. In Proceedings of the Privacy Enhancing Technology Symposium (PETS 2018), volume 3. Barcelona, Spain. July 2018.
[6] Rolf van Wegberg, Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob, Kyle Soska, Ugur Akyazi, Carlos Gañán, Bram Klievink, Nicolas Christin, and Michel van Eeten. Plug and Prey? Measuring the Commoditization of Cybercrime via Online Anonymous Markets. In Proceedings of the 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'18). Baltimore, MD. August 2018.
[7] Xiao Hui Tai, Kyle Soska, and Nicolas Christin. Adversarial Matching of Dark Net Market Vendor Accounts. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference of Knowledge, Discovery, and Data Mining (KDD'19). Anchorage, AK. August 2019.
[8] Alejandro Cuevas, Fieke Miedema, Kyle Soska, Nicolas Christin, and Rolf van Wegberg. Measurement by Proxy: On the Accuracy of Online Marketplace Measurements. In Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'22). Boston, MA. August 2012.

Last modified: Mon Nov 28 11:22:23 AM EST 2022

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