Researches create a faster Tor alternative for anonymous Internet use called HORNET
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. — Tor, the world's largest and most well-known …
Context & Ripple Effects
HORNET arrives two months after the Astoria client, another academic attempt to fix a specific weakness in Tor — together they mark 2015 as a moment when researchers stopped treating Tor's architecture as settled and started proposing replacements rather than patches.
What distinguishes HORNET is where it lives: not as an overlay of volunteer relays but as code that could be embedded in routers themselves, which would move anonymity from something users bolt on to something the network provides.
First-order effects
- Tor now faces a credible performance critique at its weakest point — speed — with HORNET claiming high-speed onion routing that could run on commodity router hardware instead of volunteer-run relays.
- Router vendors and ISPs become potential deployers of anonymity infrastructure for the first time, since HORNET is designed to ride along with equipment they already operate.
Second-order effects
- If HORNET-style routing ever reaches routers, the volunteer-relay model that defines Tor — and the trust problems it carries, like malicious exit capacity documented elsewhere in the coverage — loses its structural excuse, pressuring the Tor Project to compete on speed rather than only hardening clients like Astoria did.
- Tor's own roadmap already shows the response pattern: the four-years-in-the-making next-generation onion services rebuilt cryptography and authentication, and later work like WebTunnel's HTTPS-mimicking bridges targeted censorship — performance pressure adds a third front to defend.
Third-order effects
- The deeper question HORNET raises is whether anonymity becomes a property of network infrastructure itself — shifting censorship resistance and deanonymization battles from chasing volunteers' servers to negotiating with the equipment makers who control the plumbing.
- Anonymity networks live or die on the size of the crowd hiding inside them; a faster protocol only matters if migration can overcome the user-base advantage that keeps Tor the default today.
The trend: Anonymity technology is moving from a volunteer-run overlay bolted onto the Internet toward designs that embed privacy into the network's core infrastructure, with Tor defending its incumbent user base against purpose-built successors.