As I understand it for the public web we all use, public DNS servers serve to guide browsers to IP addresses associated with domain names. But of course IPs change for anonymity’s sake on the dark web yet “domain names” stay the same.
How does my Tor browser know the correct route to get to the site that I am trying to visit each time and know that it is always accurate and won’t take me to a different site (assuming that the owner hasn’t changed on that site)? How does this work to keep site owners anonymous without exposing their information to anyone?
On Tor dark web domains, you use the .onion domain. Tor is configured as a SOCKS proxy, so it doesn’t perform a DNS query. Instead, Tor itself sees you’re trying to connect to an onion domain name. Then it takes the URL and translates that into a public key that it knows how to find in its own hidden service directory.
Only the actual hidden service has a valid private key corresponding to that public key in the URL so cryptography (and the assumption that quantum computers don’t exist) ensures you’re talking to the right server.
Tl;dr effectively no DNS for onion hidden services
https://community.torproject.org/onion-services/overview/
From the link, since I think this is the part most equivalent to DNS.
What prevents me from doing all of that with a pre existing domain that belongs to a competitor?
If you get a state sponsored actor could it overtake things by brute force?
I am imagining this distributed nature of tor is similar to crypto currencies, where if you convince a big enough part of the network that an event did happen, for all practical purposes it’s as if it did happen.