Now, the web browser would be the place to share informations with your peers, banishing any third party intruder. Darknet, an encrypted peer-to-peer network, normally used for file sharing between closed groups of people, has found a place in browsers, courtesy two researchers Billy Hoffman and Matt Wood at Hewlett Packard (HP).

Darknet, currently, demands the proficiency in certain technology usage including servers, which limits the participation in these secured communication. To jack these limitations, Hoffman and Wood grabbed the advantage of the recent HTML 5 revolution in the browsers, like Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 and Safari. The darknet is built considering the HTML5 features that allow files to be stored on the client enabling offline work. Any file posted in the darknet would be accessible to the others who are a part of the darknet, without any physical installation of any device.
To create the browser based darknet, the user will send an encrypted email saying ‘here’s the URL’ and the website linked to the URL would become a darknet application for the recipients. The encryption for the darknet, for it to work on a computer or mobile browser, is facilitated by the new generation of JavaScript engines like Chrome’s V8 and Firefox’s TraceMonkey. The system still relies on servers to negotiate communication, but the server acts mainly as a router as the darknet would merge servers together so that clients on different servers can communicate directly.

The researchers plan to open source ‘Veiled’, the browser based darknet at the upcoming Black Hat conference, a security conference. HP’s lack of interest to monetize on Veiled will be a relief for Darknet players like Wikileaks or for anonymity tools like Tor, who would remain intact till the open source community polish the idea for its full fleged use.