HORNET: Anonymity May Come at a Price — Likely in Hard Cash!

As a Quicker and More Private Alternative to Tor Emerges, Should We Be Concerned Over the Potential Applications Cybercrime Will Find for HORNET?

High-speedOnion Routing at the Network Layer (HORNET) is the promise of high-speed, 93 Gbps, encrypted, anonymized browsing. Remind you of Tor? It’s not so far off from The Onion Router, and it even relies on the same core concepts that Tor’s inventors implemented. In terms of the anonymizers available nowadays, Tor is by far the most popular free option, lending Internet users the ability to keep their identities and communications concealed from prying eyes.

Obviously, Tor is also very popular among cybercriminals and their circles, the most infamous of all being Silk Road, an online marketplace for illegal drugs and services that was operated as a Tor hidden service. Hidden service means that connections are only accepted from other Tor nodes, essentially keeping the communication even more private. In May 2015, Silk Road was exposed, and its founder, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in running it. But Silk Road was neither the first nor last of its kind, and it’s definitely not the only one out there. Cybercriminals are avid users of Tor because it lends them the ability to conceal their misdoings from law enforcement agencies, security researchers and hostile peers.

One thing that cybercriminals aim to do and find challenging is the routing of real-time criminal activity through an anonymizer. This would allow them to commit their crimes under a cloak of anonymity with the sort of obfuscation that would effectively hide their whereabouts and the sourcing of fraudulent wire transfers or other illicit online transactions. The biggest hindrance? Tor and similar services such as I2P are simply too slow! The encryption-decryption schemes that take place inside these large networks slow things down quite a bit on the Internet, and this latency is what keeps cybercriminals from being able to abuse anonymizers in an even larger variety of illegitimate activities than they already do.

In Comes HORNET

Now HORNET has entered the anonymizing arena. A new player that’s still not publicly available, HORNET was developed on the same ideas that gave rise to Tor, conceptualized by five scientists from Zurich- and London-based universities. What this team has created is the basis for a new anonymizing network that is much like Tor, only more secure and, supposedly, much, much faster. While the current Dark Web mostly consists of Tor and I2P nodes that are being used for anonymizing Internet traffic, content and sources, HORNET promises to deliver “Internet-scale anonymous communication.”

Are you wondering what “more secure” would mean within this context? Well, it means more private. The founders claim it will have double the encryption that Tor has and run much more quickly. Just like Tor, HORNET encrypts encapsulated network requests, with each layer being decrypted by the nodes passing the traffic along to the next one, along with instructions on the data’s route and destination. Unlike Tor, HORNET uses two different onion protocols for protecting the anonymity of requests to the open Internet. It also features a modified version of Tor’s public rendezvous point (RP) scheme for communications carried out in the hidden service mode.

As for the main feature that sets HORNET apart — speed — the researchers have measured speeds of 93 Gbps when they tested HORNET between their universities in Switzerland and the U.K.

Behind this high-speed anonymizing power, HORNET’s founders indicate it uses source-selected paths and shared keys between routers to support the anonymity of communications. This means that while data is not encrypted as often as it is inside the Tor network, it still remains highly anonymized. And since there are less encryption-decryption occurrences, the entire delivery is faster and much closer to real time.

This is indeed exciting news, and many people who care about their privacy are going to be much happier about being able to use faster Internet at last. Think about activists, people who live under oppressing regimes, journalists in foreign countries, whistleblowers and your average next door neighbor who just wishes to keep his business away from dragnet surveillance or third-party monitoring — they could all benefit from such a service.

HORNET, like other anonymizers before it, is an inherently legitimate network. What we should be thinking about at the same time is that security and integrity have to be built into it right from the get-go rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

Cybercrime Loves Anonymity

If I could name one factor that helps cybercriminals feel more comfortable committing online crimes, it is by far the ability to remain unknown. It’s no wonder anonymizing tools and techniques are and always have been an important part of how criminals handle themselves online.

It’s also easy to understand that if Tor is attractive in that regard, then a faster, double-encrypted version of it will be twice as interesting to cybercriminals, offering them that x factor they have been hoping for: an anonymizer fast enough for real-time online fraud.

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