Summary
The Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) program will research technologies for a distributed messaging system that can:
- exist completely within a given network,
- provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging,
- preserve privacy to any participant in the system.
Compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for compromising any additional parts of the system. RACE advances will be based on rigorous security arguments, such as those found in the academic cryptography community or statistical arguments based on realistic simulations.
RACE will seek to create advances in communication protocol encapsulation methods as well as efficient, oblivious, distributed system tasking to build a system that is resistant to attack, even with limited participant compromises and largescale, real-time deep packet inspection.
The program will further seek to explore approaches to preserving privacy, such as secure multiparty computation and obfuscated communication protocols.
The goal of the RACE program is to create a system capable of avoiding large-scale compromise. As such, RACE research efforts will explore:
- preventing compromised information from being useful for identifying any of the system nodes because all such information is encrypted on the nodes at all times, even during computation
- preventing communications compromise by virtue of obfuscating communication protocols.
In August 2024, DARPA released code as a proof of concept.
The RACE prototype system uses cryptography and obfuscated communications to ensure that users of the system maintain their privacy. Researchers and users can experiment with the complete system or use separate components to improve existing messaging system.