HP Darknet destroys Black Hat elephant

Davey Winder
Monday, 20 July 2009 02:45

Business IT - Security

Could HP have come up with a Darknet for the great unwashed at last? All will be revealed at Black Hat in Las Vegas.

The Darknet is not, to be fair, anything new. It has always been rather exciting, and an important technology that has been used to help those in oppressive regimes to navigate around Internet censorship and state operated firewalls.

Assuming that is, those oppressed citizens have the technical know-how and savvy to be able to install and configure the assorted and complex components required to get one of these private and secure networks up and running properly of course.

The unpleasant truth is that the number of people who have been able to actually participate in any Darknet has always been pretty limited by this particular elephant in the room.

A couple of HP researchers reckon that they have a big enough technology gun to be able to shoot that elephant down, and are preparing for some target practise as the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas later this week.

Billy Hoffman, manager of HP’s Security Lab and his fellow HP researcher Matt Wood are planning to demonstrate a new kind of Darknet which has been created within the confines of a web browser,

The so-called 'Veiled Darknet' requires no additional software at all, meaning pretty much any end user will be able to make use of the secure and anonymous communication it provides be they joining in from a PC or mobile device.

The ease of use, we are told, does not come at any cost in terms of secure channel communication where shared files are encrypted, fragmented and stored locally on the computers of other members of the Darknet.

Perhaps the greatest advantage, beyond the ease of use, of the Veiled Darknet is the zero footprint installation which promises an ability to not only establish a Darknet quickly, but disperse just as quickly.