"Hidden Internet"

TOR
 

In the mid-1990s, the US military was looking for a new, secure way to transmit intelligence. Researchers at the US Navy Research Laboratory Paul Siverson, Michael Reed and David Goldschlag proposed using the so-called onion routing - a system of special nodes that sequentially encrypt information and mask the true IP address of users.

In 1997, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) became interested in the project. Scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Matthewson helped Siverson present an alpha version of the anonymous network Onion Routing project, which was later renamed The Onion Router or Tor.

In 2003, several third-party developers were admitted to the project. A couple of months later, Navy researchers released the Tor source code online, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) helped Dingledine and Matthewson refine the technology. Three years later, Internet activists helped scientists found their own organization, The Tor Project, which has been in charge of the anonymous network ever since.

Despite the fact that the main sponsor of Tor has always been the US government, forums of so-called cypherpunks - lovers of anonymity and cryptography, closely associated with the world of hackers - quickly appeared in the special domain zone .onion. Later, numerous trading platforms were added to them, where you can anonymously buy drugs, weapons, fake documents and hacker software.

Tor itself works on the basis of the aforementioned "onion" routing, and the role of protected nodes is played by several thousand computers and servers belonging to users of the anonymous network. Information is sequentially encrypted and transmitted through three randomly selected nodes (input, intermediate and output), and each of them knows only about where the encrypted data came from and where it needs to be sent next.

The list of nodes is published in the public domain, which allows the secret services of some countries to restrict access to the anonymous network. However, Tor also has secret nodes (the so-called bridges), a complete list of which is available only to the Tor Project staff.(Image below)

Freenet & I2P

Freenet has been around since 2000 and is essentially an anonymous repository of protected data. The main advantage of the network is the absence of central servers. All information is divided into blocks and stored in encrypted form on users' computers. Despite the presence of a number of sites, anonymous forums and its own mail client, so far Freenet looks like a hello from the 90s, and therefore it is mainly used by libertarian enthusiasts and supporters of cryptanarchism.

Created in 2003, the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P, is a decentralized network. Data in it is transmitted through tunnels from intermediate nodes, the role of which is played by other I2P users.(Image below)

To protect information, the so-called "garlic" routing is used: each data packet is encrypted, combined with other packets and transmitted through two nodes in the outgoing tunnel and two nodes in the incoming one. At the same time, intermediate nodes do not know what the further fate of the transmitted data packets is, and whether the next node will be the final one. Tunnels by default change every ten minutes.

Today I2P has a well-developed infrastructure - most popular clients already have encrypted messengers, mail services and even torrent trackers built into them. Nevertheless, I2P, like Freenet, is several times less popular and in demand compared to Tor, although it has a number of advantages both in the security of data transmission and in maintaining anonymity.

ZeroNet:

A decentralized network that operates similarly to P2P networks. In other words, information is transmitted directly between users and not with a server in between. Furthermore, it is an open source based service and instead of operating with an IP address for each user, it identifies them as in a blockchain network. By using a blockchain key, it signs and publishes changes on a web page that is accessed. This is similar to how any cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin does. In theory, it is impossible to censor a ZeroNet website, since they are hosted on different PCs and not on a single server. Likewise, there are no server maintenance costs. Since the page is hosted on the computers of the users connected. Well, in this post we’ll see how ZeroNet works the alternative internet based on P2P.