HORNET IS NEW TOR-LIKE ANONYMITY NETWORK

WITH SUPERFAST SPEEDS

The Deep Web is a place that is hidden from the ordinary world because the
browsers used to access the Deep Web, continuously encrypt user data. Due to
this constant data encryption, the browsing speeds are slow.
Our beloved Tor network has more than 2 million daily users that slow down its
performance. To counter this speed issue, five researchers have developed a new Torstyle anonymity network called HORNET: High-Speed Onion Routing at Network Layer.
Compared to anonymity networks like Tor, the HORNET system is more resistant to
attacks and it delivers faster node speeds. The researcher team writes, unlike other
onion routing implementations, HORNET routers do not keep per-flow state or perform
computationally expensive operations for data forwarding, allowing the system to scale
as new clients are added.
This paper Hornet: High-Speed Onion Routing at Network Layer was written by
researchers Chen Chen of Carnegie Mellon University, along with David Barrera, Enrico
Asoni, and Adrian Perrig of Zurichs Federal Institute of Technology, and George
Danezis from University College of London. Heres the research paper.
To achieve speeds higher than Tor, HORNET doesnt encrypt data as often- instead it
encrypts just the personal stuff. In Tor, anonymity comes at the price of speed. To
provide anonymity, Tor takes data and passes it through series of computers before the
final destination. Each time, it passes from one computer to the other, the encryption
exists and IP addresses change. Thus, it forms a time-taking multilayer network (hence
The Onion Router).

HORNET nodes process the anonymous traffic at more than 93Gb/s speed.
The basic architecture of Tor and HORNET is same(onion routing). HORNET creates an
encryption key set along with the routing info (connection state) on your system. Thus,
the intermediate nodes dont need to build this information each time, as these keys and
connection state info is carried within packet headers (anonymous header or AHDR).
According to the research paper, it makes the whole system more secure as the other
intermediate computers dont waste time playing with the senders and receivers
packets. Thus, the whole process becomes more fast and secure.
It is worth mentioning that HORNET is not yet tested at a large scale, its just these 5
researchers. Thus, extensive peer review is needed to adopt systems like HORNET.