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Arstechnica describes a new onion routing network that will add speed, without sacrificing anonymity, and has the ability to be deployed via a router SDK.
Tor, the world's largest and most well-known "onion router" network, offers a degree of anonymity that has made it a popular tool of journalists, dissidents, and everyday Internet users who are trying to avoid government or corporate censorship (as well as Internet drug lords and child pornographers). But one thing that it doesn't offer is speed—its complex encrypted "circuits" bring Web browsing and other tasks to a crawl. That means that users seeking to move larger amounts of data have had to rely on virtual private networks—which while they are anonymous, are much less protected than Tor (since VPN providers—and anyone who has access to their logs—can see who users are).
A group of researchers—Chen Chen, Daniele Enrico Asoni, David Barrera, and Adrian Perrig of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich and George Danezis of University College London—may have found a new balance between privacy and performance. In a paper published this week, the group described an anonymizing network called HORNET (High-speed Onion Routing at the NETwork layer), an onion-routing network that could become the next generation of Tor. According to the researchers, HORNET moves anonymized Internet traffic at speeds of up to 93 gigabits per second. And because it sheds parts of Tor's network routing management, it can be scaled to support large numbers of users with minimal overhead, they claim.
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As implemented in its testing, HORNET's routing nodes can actually be embedded in network routers. The researchers build HORNET infrastructure code into Intel software routers using the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). HORNET client code, which included hidden services, was built in Python. "To our knowledge, no other anonymity protocols have been implemented in a router SDK," the researchers wrote.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @02:02PM
Anything that replaces Tor must do more than just be efficient. It needs a way to make traffic analysis more difficult in order to prevent well-resourced groups from simply looking at dataflows among nodes. Off the top of my head that means a way to reorder traffic too, so that you can't assume FIFO for packets going in and coming out of a relay. That would meaning slowing of traffic (and would require store-and-forward buffering ability on each relay). Other possibly useful features would be things like the ability to send null packets that simply expire at after X number of hops and fragmentation so that one packet going into a relay might cause three packets to exit the relay (and not all of them necessarily going to same relay on the next hop).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:10PM
Another possibility would be to simply have a constant stream of packets, so you cannot distinguish between packets that actually transport content, and packets that are just filler. The downside is, of course, that it produces lots of useless traffic when little data is transmitted (but then, some capacity shaping could be done, provided it reacts slowly enough that you cannot connect a traffic peak with a specific source).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.