‘Internet-scale anonymity’: Researchers unveil high-speed Tor alternative

Good to see an alternative to Tor coming out, Tor is extremely slow… -AK

http://www.rt.com/news/310753-hornet-anonymous-network-tor/

Published time: 25 Jul, 2015 23:50
Edited time: 25 Jul, 2015 23:57

An international team of researchers have presented a new routing network they say paves the way for internet-scale anonymity.” A more secure alternative to the Tor, the new HORNET suggests better scaling and much greater browsing speeds.

The “High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer” (HORNET) was developed by five researchers from the UK, the USA and Switzerland. A research paper, presented earlier this week, outlines details of their project which is yet to undergo large scale tests and a peer review process.

HORNET seems on the surface to be a reaction to a volley of revelations concerning the global surveillance programs, which essentially destroyed the notion of online privacy and anonymity. The developers sought to combine the anonymity of the Dark Net with the high-speed browsing internet users are accustomed to.

“HORNET is designed to be highly efficient,” researchers said. Without sacrificing security, the network supports data transfer speeds of up to 93GBps and can be scaled at little cost.

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In the so-called onion routing networks, the data packet is encrypted by each node as it passes to its destination. However the process takes time and resources, especially when the number of users grows. So HORNET researchers decided to overcome the weaknesses of Tor and reduce the cryptography work required from each node.

“Instead of keeping state at each relay, connection state (such as onion layer decryption keys) is carried within packet headers, allowing intermediate nodes to quickly forward traffic for large numbers of clients,” says the paper.