A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks (usually used for with a peer-to-peer connection), and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.
The term "darknet" was popularized by major news outlets to associate with Tor Onion services, when the infamous drug bazaar Silk Road used it, despite the terminology being unofficial. Technology such as Tor, I2P, and Freenet are intended to defend digital rights by providing security, anonymity, or censorship resistance and are used for both illegal and legitimate reasons. Anonymous communication between whistle-blowers, activists, journalists and news organisations is also facilitated by darknets through use of applications such as SecureDrop.
The term originally described computers on ARPANET that were hidden, programmed to receive messages but not respond to or acknowledge anything, thus remaining invisible, in the dark.
Since ARPANET, the usage of dark net has expanded to include friend-to-friend networks (usually used for with a peer-to-peer connection) and privacy networks such as Tor. The reciprocal term for a darknet is a clearnet or the surface web when referring to content indexable by search engines.
The term "darknet" is often used interchangeably with "dark web" because of the quantity of hidden services on Tor's darknet. Additionally, the term is often inaccurately used interchangeably with the deep web because of Tor's history as a platform that could not be search-indexed. Mixing uses of both these terms has been described as inaccurate, with some commentators recommending the terms be used in distinct fashions.
"Darknet" was coined in the 1970s to designate networks isolated from ARPANET (the government-founded military/academical network which evolved into the Internet), for security purposes.
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This advanced course will provide students with the knowledge to tackle the design of privacy-preserving ICT systems. Students will learn about existing technologies to prect privacy, and how to evalu
A decentralized system is one that works when no single party is in charge or fully trusted. This course teaches decentralized systems principles while guiding students through the engineering of thei
Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic via a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network that consists of more than seven thousand relays. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's Internet activity. Tor protects personal privacy by concealing a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. It protects the user's freedom and ability to communicate confidentially through IP address anonymity using Tor exit nodes.
Sneakernet, also called sneaker net, is an informal term for the transfer of electronic information by physically moving media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives between computers, rather than transmitting it over a computer network. The term, a tongue-in-cheek play on net(work) as in Internet or Ethernet, refers to walking in sneakers as the transport mechanism. Alternative terms may be floppy net, train net, or pigeon net.
An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants. Interest in anonymous P2P systems has increased in recent years for many reasons, ranging from the desire to share files without revealing one's network identity and risking litigation to distrust in governments, concerns over mass surveillance and data retention, and lawsuits against bloggers.
Distributed low-latency datacenter applications must meet strict service-level objectives in the order of microseconds. R2P2 is a novel datacenter transport protocol designed for such services. This work extends R2P2 with congestion control and request-lev ...
Existing anonymity systems sacrifice anonymity for efficient communication or vice-versa. Onion-routing achieves low latency, high bandwidth, and scalable anonymous communication, but is susceptible to traffic analysis attacks. Designs based on DC-Nets, on ...
2016
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Exemplary embodiments of the present disclosure provide cryptographically-strong tracking protection with unnoticeable "single-hop" network latencies by leveraging a client-relay- server architecture, in which the clients, relays (trusted or untrusted), an ...