
HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer - sp332
http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05724v1
======
nickpsecurity
Interesting research. We won't know how impressive it is until the kinds of
people that break Tor give it a thorough analysis. Otherwise, it might be a
scheme that simply _de-anonymizes_ users faster than the competition. I'll add
that combining anonymity and performance seems to be one of the hardest
security problems to get right with so much left to learn. So, I don't trust
anything that does that, including Tor.

Asynchronous, non-real-time schemes that look like vanilla web traffic are the
best. Especially using covert channels. However, my method is to do face-to-
face with possible and otherwise use burner PC's, LiveCD's, and random Wifi
hotspots. Tor or proxies optionally as extra layer of difficulty depending on
what I'm doing.

~~~
xoa
>I'll add that combining anonymity and performance seems to be one of the
hardest security problems to get right with so much left to learn.

A certain penalty in both available bandwidth and latency seems unavoidable in
any distributed onion anonymization system, but one _practical_ issue may
actually be something that I think doesn't get brought up nearly often enough
in this context: a plain and simple lack of _raw_ bandwidth. In other words,
more practical anonymity would be yet another emergent benefit/application of
near universal FTTH gigabit+ class connections. While some applications can
use as much bandwidth and as low latency as it's possible to provide, many
popular, commonly used ones on the present Internet instead have a value
beyond which there are few further benefits. One of the hungrier applicatinos
for example is streaming video, but once someone is stably hitting ~50-100
Mbps they're already at what a full quality Blu-ray would offer, even without
H.265, and with H.265 even 4K is going to look pretty great.

So if a given anonymity network had an overall overhead of 90%, or even 95%,
well that's certainly significant. But at the same time if someone has 1 Gbps
to throw at it, then even 5-10% remaining would still result in more
_effective_ bandwidth available then large percentages of the population have
raw right now, and more importantly enough for most of the current popular web
applications. It would also have additional implications for the health and
participation rates of the anonymity network, particular given that fiber
links are symmetrical. These networks in general needs significant donations
of bandwidth on the part of users to work effectively. When many, if not most
users don't have that much available period then that can be tough: for
somebody stuck on a 6/1 ADSL link giving up even a few hundred kbps could be
painful. Whereas with an abundance, many if not most users would never even
notice having 500+ Mbps serving as relay capacity at all times. This would
further improve the overall value of the network, encouraging further use, and
creating a virtuous circle.

Doing more with less is certainly very important, but no one should lose sight
of how much in computer science has come from just plain having more.
Anonymity networks would be best if they weren't "anonymity networks" per se,
but rather simply "the network", as in what most people could use to
accomplish anything on the Internet they'd want to. Ubiquitous encryption has
been aided by better coding, but the most significant boost has come from
having an abundance of computing resources, to the point where the overhead of
encryption simply is irrelevant to the vast majority of users vs the benefits
to security. An abundance of (symmetrical) bandwidth could enable a similar
leap forward in anonymity online. It's another reason why we should really be
pushing hard for major last mile information infrastructure improvements, and
it's so unfortunate that the USA in particular has grossly underinvested and
allowed companies to set the agenda there (unlike with electricity, phones and
roads, which received major national pushes to the ultimate benefit of the
whole country).

~~~
the8472
> One of the hungrier applicatinos for example is streaming video, but once
> someone is stably hitting ~50-100 Mbps they're already at what a full
> quality Blu-ray would offer, even without H.265, and with H.265 even 4K is
> going to look pretty great.

When more bandwidth gets deployed someone will roll out more bandwidth-
consuming video.

near and mid term: 4k, 3D, 10bit, 4:4:4, 60fps, lossless sound

long term: 120fps, 8k, light field 3D

~~~
nickpsecurity
And that's not opinion: that's a fact of life in tech that repeats endlessly.
Induced demand, Jevons paradox, Parkinson's law... the principle shows up
endlessly.

Now, what effect it would have on a 1Gbit anonymity network is anyone's guess.
All the streaming and web apps on my network don't really impact its normal
performance because they're much slower than it. So, this concern might not
affect what the other commenter proposes in practice.

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Systemic33
If those figures (93Gb/s) are right and represents a real-world scenario, and
not a lab test, then it's really impressive.

The following quote from the article highlights the difference between HORNET
and Tor:

"Unlike onion routing protocols that use global re-routing through overlay
networks (e.g., Tor [23] and I2P [47]), HORNET uses short paths created by the
underlying network architecture to reduce la- tency, and is therefore bound by
the network’s physical intercon- nection and ISP relationships. This is an
unavoidable constraint for onion routing protocols built into the network
layer [29, 42]."

~~~
travjones
So does that mean that traffic on HORNET is viewable by one's ISP? (Sorry if
this is a noob question)

~~~
JulianMorrison
They would see that you were communicating (because by necessity, all your
stuff passes through them) but not who to, because they couldn't strip off the
next layer of the onion. Much like Tor.

~~~
travjones
Thanks, Julian.

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sudioStudio64
Its interesting that TOR takes a circuit based approach and these guys use a
packet based approach... its the same thing that happened in telecom over a
decade ago. (its analogous, anyway)

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dredmorbius
One thing I suspect widespread use of onion routing will need are compatible
anonymous reputation systems. I'd _really_ like to see work in this area.

I'm aware of two proposed systems, both largely academic: FAUST and Fair
Anonymity:

[https://gnunet.org/node/1704](https://gnunet.org/node/1704)

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4707v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4707v1.pdf)

One idea is that older (and still trustworthy) tokens become reliable and more
valuable, encouraging parties to 1) keep their tokens for a long time and 2)
behave themselves. As I recall, both operate with the concept of a token
server. In the case of FAUST, tokens are requested unblinded (that is, from a
non-Tor IP), but are anonymous and cannot be associated with the requestor
after the fact.

If there's other or more recent work, I'd really like to hear about them.

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cbsmith
I'm going to have to look at this closely. My first thought here is that it
seems impossible to get high performance without leaking at least some form of
sub-channel signaling about communications, but I don't yet understand the
real "trick" behind HORNET.

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DonGateley
What stands in the way of deployment of this for general usage? Invention,
disclosure, coding or what?

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dang
Url changed from [https://www.dailydot.com/politics/hornet-tor-anonymity-
netwo...](https://www.dailydot.com/politics/hornet-tor-anonymity-network),
which summarizes it and embeds it, yet doesn't link to it.

