A darknet (or dark net ) is a portion of routed, allocated IP space not running any services. Traffic arriving to such IP dark space is undesired since it has no active hosts. [1] The term dark net has been mistakenly conflated with the dark web which is an overlay network that can be accessed only with specific software, configurations, or authorization, often using non-standard communication protocols and ports . Dark webs are friend-to-friend networks (usually used for file sharing with a peer-to-peer connection) and privacy networks such as Tor . The reciprocal term for an encrypted darknet is clearnet or surface web when referring to content indexable by search engines.
