HORNET Onion Routing - Tor Rival?

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/4500250948/Tor-anonymity-called-into-question-as-alternative-browser-surfaces HORNET -- a Tor alternative? In other Tor news, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University College London introduced an alternative onion network dubbed HORNET. Short for high-speed onion routing at the network layer, it offers the same promise of anonymous browsing but with better scaling, stronger privacy and higher speed -- researchers claimed it can process anonymous traffic at over 93 Gbps. Researchers also said each HORNET node can process anonymous traffic for "a practically unlimited number of sources." Like Tor, HORNET uses a group of relay nodes to mix and encrypt traffic -- and hide users' locations and IP addresses -- in layers to ensure anonymity. However, researchers say it is not plagued with the decreased speed that Tor and other anonymity networks regularly experience. The low-latency onion routing system "uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no per-flow state on intermediate nodes," researchers wrote. "Unlike other onion routing implementations, HORNET routers do not keep overflow state or perform computationally expensive operations for data forwarding, allowing the system to scale as new clients are added. "It is designed to be highly efficient; 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." Because the system does not store per-session states, it also providers "stronger security guarantees" than other onion network options. The researchers also claimed it is less vulnerable to identity-revealing attacks such as session linkage and packet correlation. However, it is not completely immune to attack; confirmation attacks leveraging flow analysis, timing analysis and packet tagging can potentially be successfully executed to determine identity. "However," researchers wrote, "HORNET raises the bar of deploying such attacks for secretive mass surveillance: the adversary must be capable of controlling a significant percentage of ISPs often residing in multiple geopolitical boundaries, not to mention keeping such massive activity confidential." Users should not jump on the bandwagon yet, however; HORNET has not yet been peer-reviewed. http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/4500250948/Tor-anonymity-called-into-question-as-alternative-browser-surfaces MORE Tor Browser Challenger: HORNET stands for High-speed Onion Routing at the NETwork layer http://cointelegraph.com/news/115001/hornet-high-speed-protocol-for-a-fully-encrypted-anonymous-internet Researchers claim they’ve developed a better, faster Tor HORNET, a high-speed onion routing network, could be deployed on routers as part of the Internet. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/researchers-claim-theyve-developed-a-better-faster-tor/ --------------------- COMMENT Potential vulnerability points mean nothing to me. I just think it's cool something new is out. Wonder who gets to review Hornet and if there's any built-in backdoors? LOL Tor anonymity network - here.