A New Kind of Hidden Networking Science

Authoritarian regimes are increasingly able to monitor and target internet communications, leaving many people in those countries unable to communicate freely with each other. In response, the internet freedom and national security communities manually design hidden networks with ad hoc techniques, empirically validate them, and then deploy them in the hope that users are not discovered.

Over the years, Congress has consistently allocated funds for a range of activities aimed at bolstering global internet freedom. These initiatives have been instrumental in the development of technologies that empower citizens in repressed nations to bypass censorship, the provision of internet and mobile communications security training, the enhancement of media and advocacy skills, and the formulation of public policy.

In support of internet freedom efforts and the protection of U.S. armed forces, DARPA invests in the development of technologies that provide confidence in the information domain, including the delivery of electronic messages in many forms and with various gradations of observability. Specifically, the agency's Information Innovation Office (I2O) has funded research and development on protecting, detecting attacks on, and measuring the health of this domain, broadly construed.

I2O's latest program, Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection¹ (PWND²), will continue that legacy. Building off the success of the program Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE), which recently released its code on GitHub, PWND² will develop formal models of emergent communication pathways (AKA weird networks) to fundamentally improve the deployment and detection of robust and resilient hidden networks.

DARPA has been making big strides in leveraging formal methods to create capabilities that can secure and prove the absence of exploitable cyber vulnerabilities. With the proliferation of software-defined networking, DARPA hypothesizes that the combination of formal methods² with software-based definitions of hidden networks can yield mathematical guarantees of privacy and performance, surpassing the traditional approach of building, testing, and just hoping for the best.

"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, i.e., 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 tradeoffs between performance and privacy."

PWND² is planned as a 30-month, single-phase program. During this time, PWND² research teams will seek to create a new domain-specific language and formal analysis tools to verify the properties of weird networks within hidden communication systems. Complete program details are available on Sam.gov via the PWND² Broad Agency Announcement.

[1] The meaning of PWN is to dominate and defeat (someone or something), especially in video gaming. The DARPA program acronym PWND² is phonetically pronounced as "doubly powned."

[2] Formal methods are mathematical techniques for designing, analyzing, and verifying systems.

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