To stay ahead in the security race, Tor is building the next-generation Dark Net in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. military agency charged with inventing the cutting edge of new technology.
The funding, which began in 2014, comes as part of DARPA’s Memex project, a “groundbreaking” search engine designed to best commercial titans like Google at searching the Deep Web and other oft-ignored terrain for the U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and military. To build Memex, DARPA is partnered with universities like Carnegie Mellon, NASA, private research firms, and several Tor Project developers.
New technology developments, fixes and upgrades, and in-depth statistics on hidden services were among the work funded by DARPA’s grant under the Memex project.
The Dark Net road map moving forward is ambitious. Tor plans to double the encryption strength of hidden service’s identity key and to allow offline storage for that key, a major security upgrade.
Led by data scientist Christopher White, Memex is explicitly not aimed at de-anonymizing any Tor user or “accessing information not intended to be publicly available,” according to a recent DARPA blog post.
See the full story here: http://www.dailydot.com/politics/next-generation-tor-darpa/