HORNET: Ultra High Speed & Secure TOR Alternative

Learn about Hornet, the ultra-fast and secure Tor alternative. In this informative article, you will learn about its features, benefits, and how it co

Tor network alternative

For many years until now, Tor has been the favorite option to maintain anonymity on the Internet. Tor was initially developed by the US Naval Research Lab and works based on ‘onion routing’ principles. Even though it handles over 2 Million users on its network daily comprising mostly journalists, activists, law enforcement and hackers etc, Tor has its faults. It is often slow and frustrating because its performance is based on the number of systems that make up the network. HORNET aims to resolve this issue.

HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer.

High-speed onion routing network HORNET is capable of handling anonymous traffic at speeds of more than 93 Gbps while maintaining privacy. The new anonymous network is built by researcher Chen Chen of Carnegie Mellon University, along with Daniele Enrico Asoni, Adrian Perrig and David Barrera of the Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology, and George Danezis of University College London.

Hornet - the better alternative to Tor.

The research team who developed HORNET, in their n a paper (PDF) titled HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer, says it is a low-latency onion routing system that enables end-to-end anonymous channels with a quicker and more secure alternative to Tor.

"[HORNET] is designed to be highly efficient," reads the paper, "instead of keeping state at each relay, connection state (such as onion layer decryption keys) is carried within packet headers, allowing intermediate nodes to quickly forward traffic for large numbers of clients."

High Speed(93Gbps) with High Security.

HORNET does not keep per-session states or "perform computationally expensive operations for data forwarding," thus allowing to scale as required with no limitations, speeding up to 93Gbps !. From Security perspective, spying on HORNET users is not so easy because spy agencies or hackers would need to control "a significant percentage of ISPs" across multiple geopolitical areas, keeping their surveillance activities quiet. For people who are relying on Tor and other similar services this new anonymous network would be greatly useful.

Update: New Better Tor Alternative has been developed. Check it out: RIFFLE – A Better TOR Alternative To Protect Privacy.

Source: HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer.