DARPA tests ideas to create Hidden Networks to aid people in authoritarian regimes

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking to aid those living under authoritarian regimes with limited freedom of communication under a new plan to make future deployment and detection of hidden networks “weird.” With the unusually titled “Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection (PWND2)” program, DARPA aims to take “revolutionary” steps rather than “evolutionary” ones that only improve existing systems, seeking proposals that will offer truly novel network concepts.

“If we’re successful, I envision the creation of a new science of hidden networks,” said Michael Lack, DARPA program manager for PWND2. “What’s traditionally been an artisan-driven process, E.G.: literally clever people in a room coming up with clever ideas, can be transformed using mathematical rigor to provide greater confidence when deploying a network with a clear understanding of the trade offs between performance and privacy.”

Today’s Hidden Communications Systems (HCS) are crucial to national security and internet freedom but have significant vulnerabilities, and their design processes are often ad hoc with the final product often unable to guarantee anonymity.

Time is the greatest enemy of any HCS. They exist in a complex and ever-changing design space, yet their designers work from an understanding of a network at a fixed point in time. Also, when an adversary identifies any capability, it loses its usefulness and becomes vulnerable to hostile exploitation. Then the long process of designing a new technique must begin again from scratch.

Additionally, thoroughly testing these networks is almost impossible. While some testing does occur, testing for the most obscure and convoluted real-world network environments is not feasible. What empirical testing can be performed is costly and time-consuming.

For Lack and his DARPA team, solving these issues required getting a little “weird.”

“PWND² defines the term Weird Network (WN) as infrastructure that enables emergent, unintended communications outside the original specification of a network and can formally represent any form of hidden or obfuscated communication,” Lack told reporters concerning what, precisely, DARPA means by “weird” in the case of hidden networks.

“This concept is analogous to how weird machines provide a formalism for describing unintended, emergent code execution,” Lack said. “WNs are use-case agnostic and can enable hidden communications in support of internet freedom or other use cases where the fact that entities are communicating needs to be kept secret.”

With testing one of the most significant obstacles, how can teams create “provably” weird networks though?

“The term ‘provably’ is key in that this program will explore whether Software-Defined Networking (SDN) approaches paired with formal methods can provide provable privacy and performance guarantees for hidden communication systems at a meaningful scale,” Lack explained.

PWND²’s immediate predecessor was another DARPA project called Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE). Lack described how the new initiative seeks to build upon what RACE accomplished.

“On RACE, performers built multiple robust and obfuscated communication channels to help ensure that users of the system maintain their privacy,” he explained. “The privacy of those channels was empirically tested against a specific type of adversary. The PWND2 program seeks to go beyond empirical testing and provide mathematically provable guarantees about the privacy and performance of obfuscated channels like those developed on RACE.”

Over thirty months, teams will develop new languages and analysis tools for network communications. They aim to test PWND2’s hypothesis that “software-defined networking approaches paired with formal methods can provide provable privacy and performance guarantees for hidden communication systems at meaningful scale.” To do this, they will investigate new weird networks, their relationship to the traditional networks they emerged from, and adversary capabilities.

DARPA seeks to make weird networks a big-tent project in the future with Lack saying that there is still time to draft proposals for anyone interested in pushing the boundaries of network science.

“Last week DARPA published the broad agency announcement, which we use to cast a wide net to solicit ideas in this research area. We encourage anyone who has relevant ideas – whether they’re from a small business or large, as well as academic researchers – to consider submitting an abstract by our deadline,” he said.