Five academics developed an alternative Tor network (HORNET) that can handle traffic up to 93Gb per second while maintaining protection of your private life.
The HORNET system is more robust than existing anonymity networks such as Tor to passive attacks and offers higher node speeds for an "almost unlimited" variety of sources.
It is the brainchild of researcher Chen Chen from his University Carnegie Mellon. The researcher developed HORNET together with Daniele Enrico Asoni, David Barrera, and Adrian Perrig of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and Greek George Danezis of University College London.
"Unlike other Onion routing applications, HORNET routers do not maintain per-flow stages or run costly data transmission processes, allowing the system to run smoothly as new clients are added," the team wrote in the HORNET paper. High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer (PDF).
"HORNET offers payload protection by default, and can defend against some global espionage attacks.
“It's designed to be highly efficient: instead of maintaining stages at each relay, connection state (such as onion decryption keys) performs internal transportation packet headers, allowing intermediate nodes to operate faster even on a large number of clients”
The group argues that HORNET has such a low latency state of anonymous protocols as Dovetail [PDF] without the “significant degraded security safeguards” that can eventually be bypassed by attackers such as government services which have global data collection capabilities.
The speed of HORNET is possible in part through the use of symmetric cryptography for the transmission of data that do not require per-flow stages at intermediate nodes.
"This design allows HORNET nodes to process anonymous traffic at 93 Gb per second, adding a minimal charge per additional processing of anonymous channels," the team said.
They also state that the platform opens the way for anonymous Internet through small compromises on the size of the headers, something that will greatly benefit security and maintain high performance.
