OnionCity

The murky past of OnionCity

Onion.City was a search tool built on the Tor2Web proxy system, enabling users to search for underground markets from standard web browsers without requiring the installation of Tor Browser.

Developed by Aaron Swartz and Virgil Griffith, Tor2Web continued under Griffith’s stewardship after Swartz’s passing. Griffith introduced OnionCity, a search engine akin to Google, specifically designed for the dark web. It indexes dark web content, allowing users to input search terms and receive results from its database.

Powered by the Tor2Web proxy, this project allows regular internet users to access .onion domains. However, it’s important to note that Tor2Web is not a replacement for the secure browsing offered by the Tor browser. It acts as an intermediary between standard browsers like Apple’s Safari and the .onion sites of the dark web. A notable feature of Onion.City is that search results end with a .city suffix instead of .onion.

Due to the dark web’s potential for hosting illegal content like child pornography and black markets, OnionCity has blacklisted certain domains to comply with U.S. law and internet regulations. At one point, it had indexed around 664,000 sites.

In its early stages, OnionCity operated on an insecure http:// connection, which raised concerns about the potential interception of web traffic. The search engine’s use of Google to help index its vast array of pages also drew scrutiny. Griffith acknowledged the limitations of relying on Google but viewed it as a necessary step for initial development.

Virgil Griffith’s interactions with the Tor Project, particularly during an ethics investigation, highlighted various concerns. In a TorProject pipermail, he defended the subdomain structure of tor2web URLs, initially chosen by Aaron Swartz for compatibility with /robots.txt protocols. However, his actions, including the alleged harvesting of HSDir data and attempts to sell this information, were heavily criticized by Tor contributors, leading to further controversy.

The closure of OnionCity stemmed from these concerns, coupled with issues over its data logs and basic HTTPS encryption. After failing to renew its domain in 2019, OnionCity ceased operations. Tor2Web is currently maintained by Giovanni Pellerano from the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, under the GlobaLeaks Project, with financial backing from the Open Technology Fund.