DARKNET CORPORATION Read Online Free PDF Page B

ammunition supplies. “That’s more
interesting,” thought Bill but was immediately deflated when he scrolled right
and noted that the total cost was US$120. Personal weapon, presumably, he
surmised.
    He turned to the inbound email. Floods of spam. He checked a few in case there might be something hidden in innocuous-looking
spam emails, but he was starting to go cross-eyed with them and just scanned
down looking for something real. He could not find anything that looked
personal or business related.
    Just then Jenkins appeared with a plump-looking fellow in tow.
    “Sir, I’ve brought Kowalski here over from ‘ Comms ’
to give you a briefing on Darknet,” he announced. “We’re set up in conference
room 1, when you’re ready.”
    Bill was happy to interrupt his concentration on the tedium of digging in
Wood’s trash and followed them into the conference room, nodding
acknowledgement to Kowalski.
    There was a PowerPoint presentation cued up on the screen entitled
‘Covert Networks Exploitation of the Internet”.
    Kowalski launched into a history of covert activity on the web and Bill
was unsurprised to discover that the US military were largely responsible for
the design of the techniques employed by those who wished to remain anonymous
on the web. The covert techniques began and evolved almost concurrently with
the development of Internet Protocol networks with a view to hiding routing
information, which clearly would create opportunities for military exploitation
by eavesdroppers and enemies. Kowalski explained how the concepts had been
taken up by various academics and enthusiasts and developed incrementally over
the years.
    Kowalski announced “As with most tools they can be used for good or
evil.”
    “What do we use it for, good or evil?” shot back Bill.
    Kowalski turned towards Bill, his mouth opening and closing silently like
a fish.
    “I’m only pulling your tits,” apologised Bill, to Kowalski’s complete
bewilderment.
    Eventually Kowalski got back on track and explained that one of the key
enablers in the network is the willingness of volunteer participants to run
software on their computers to route traffic independently over the web, as a
‘relay node’.
    In the normal web, he explained, the explicit name of a website or URL
(uniform resource locator) identifies firstly, a high level register, for
example ‘.com’ which segregates the vast number of websites into a set which is
a little more manageable. In effect it tells the browser which directory to
look in for the website. The domain name, the piece in front of the ‘.com’, is
used as a lookup in the directory to find a unique address in the network
associated with that name. This occurs in Domain Name Servers (DNS) and every
Internet Service Provider provides this service to its users, so that it is
ubiquitous.
    The browser accessing the website provides its unique network IP address
so that the response from the website can be routed back to the right browser.
Once the start and end points have been determined by this process, any and all
routers on the Internet will route traffic packets to the destination IP, even
if some paths become interrupted, busy or closed down. This makes the network
infinitely dynamic and robust and also why it is called “the web”.
    Bill was pretty much aware, at this level, how the Internet worked.
    Kowalski went on to contrast the Darknet. The Darknet uses the Internet
as the underlying infrastructure, but creates tunnels within it. In addition to
using the DNS process for regular websites, it is also able to provide its own,
private list of computers operated by volunteers that are used as relay nodes,
instead of, or in addition to Internet routers.
    The Darknet uses a modified browser, programmed to make use of the
Darknet private relay nodes to map a path to the website using a unique
sequence of relays nodes for each session. If they go back to that same website
later the browser will use a