Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE)

2018

The bureau of information innovations Information Innovation Office (I2O) at Department of perspective researches of the U.S. Department of Defense (DARPA at the Pentagon) started the project on development of the messenger, protected, steady against cracking,^[1] for anonymous communication].

The project under the name "Uninterrupted Anonymous Communication for All" (Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone, RACE) is focused on use of the latest cryptographic technologies. The DARPA holds the tender for development of the RACE messenger. According to technical specifications of the project (the document is available at CNews), the amount of its financing is $44 million.

It is supposed that the RACE system will be based on technologies of the distributed messages within the set network, including, without connection to the Internet, with ensuring confidentiality, integrity and availability of message exchange, with preserving of complete anonymity for any participant of message exchange.

Project details

With DARPA she intends to attract the latest technologies in the field of cryptographic and communication methods of protection to creation of an anonymous failsafe mobile telecommunication system. It is supposed that the RACE platform will use advanced methods of encapsulation of protocols of communication and also distributions of system tasks using the protocol of confidential (multilateral) calculation (Secure Multiparty Computation, MPC).

As a result it is supposed that the RACE system will not be able to be cracked even at a partial compromise of certain participants of data exchange and also in case of large-scale deep scanning of the sent packets in real time.

At the top level system architecture of RACE includes two key components: the client who is considered as mobile application on the mobile device, and the distributed server consisting of a set of server nodes in uniform networked environment.

The task of DARPA means development of mobile application in the version for the Android operating system while server nodes should work at special versions of Windows and/or Linux. Besides, a system should support work of server nodes on home PCs (high performance).

The program of creation of the RACE messenger will be organized in three stages: 18 months on the first stage, 12 months for the second and 18 months on the third. At the first stage development of basic tools and technologies for testing of separate components of a system is supposed. At the second stage primary integration of RACE and also experiments with scaling of separate components is supposed.

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