PWND2 Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection

2024: Program Development

In late September 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) announced a program to deploy and discover anonymous networks Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection (PWND2). It is assumed that a combination of formal methods and software-defined networks (SDNs) will be used to create such hidden channels.

It is noted that in a number of countries, the authorities control Internet communications, as a result of which users cannot freely communicate with each other. In response, communities on internet freedom develop hidden networks using special methods, empirically test them, and then deploy them in the hope that they will not be detected. The new DARPA initiative is designed to ensure secret data transmission.

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The PWND2 concept builds on the achievements of the RACE (Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone) program - an open source project aimed at developing technologies to ensure anonymous, secure and sustainable metadata exchange for users around the world. It is said that DARPA has made great progress in using formal methods to create capabilities that can ensure security and prove the absence of vulnerabilities in cyberspace. Formal methods are a complex of closely interconnected branches of mathematics and computer science aimed at developing mathematical methods for describing, analyzing and transforming programs and systems in general, which are focused on increasing their reliability and resource characteristics.

Against the background of the development of SDN, according to DARPA, the combination of formal methods with software definitions of hidden networks can provide mathematical guarantees of privacy and performance that surpass traditional approaches. ^[1]

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