Five researchers have presented HORNET, an alternative to Tor that aims to provide a more high-speed anonymous browsing experience.
In their whitepaper, Chen Chen of Carnegie Mellon University, George Danezis of University College London, and Daniele Enrico Asoni, David Barrera and Adrian Perrig, of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich), referred to HORNET as a low-latency onion routing system operating on the network layer.
“Our system uses only symmetric cryptography for data forwarding yet requires no per-flow state on intermediate nodes,” the whitepaper said. “This design enables HORNET nodes to process anonymous traffic at over 93 Gbps. HORNET can also scale as required, adding minimal processing overhead per additional anonymous channel.”
The researchers noted in the whitepaper that “small trade-offs in packet header size” enhance security and maintain high performance.
