Van den Hooff’s Vuvuzela makes the Internet safer

Anonymous Internet can still be anonymous. Before that, the Dutch student developed a completely new network. This should make it much harder for hackers and intelligence agencies to spy on people.

As a student of the Vossiusgymnasium in Amsterdam, Van den Hooff in 2009 won gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics Programming competition for the students.

He then spent a year studying Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam. In 2010 he moved to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the Internet in the 60s was born.

While at the institution he developed a search engine called Vuvuzela, which enabled one to surf the Web anonymously. Shielded between steps there are millions of people who want to use the Internet without being tracked, such as Whistle-blowers and opposition members in dictatorships.

They currently use the so-called TOR network. This type leads them through many shielded intermediate steps to their destination, such as a forbidden website.

The first computer on the network knows the user, the final destination, but through the entire intermediate steps one knows both. Users disappear into the crowd. At least that's the idea.

Because intelligence services and hackers are getting better, “a strong opponent can follow the whole crowd and see precisely as I talk to the first intermediate step, who talks to the second waypoint, and so on. '' In addition, the opponent can see what is going back and forth.

If I make a crowd go in with a stack of newspapers, and someone leaves the crowd with a stack of newspapers, they know that it has to come from me, without having ever seen us talk, "said Van den Hooff against the ANP.

The network of Van den Hooff constantly sends each user information to anyone. Part of it is real, some are fake. All the packets are of the same size. This brings so much traffic on the network, an attacker of the trees of the forest no longer sees. He is overwhelmed with noise and chatter.

Van den Hooff and his colleagues came up with the name: Vuvuzela. During the 2010 World Cup in South African, the horn was heard everywhere and made fans and viewers crazy. The prototype Vuvuzela is yet to be introduced.

Van den Hooff stressed that, "The vuvuzela is dependent on a small number of trusted servers, to be managed by very reliable people with lots of money. They are not so easy to find. "