DARPA plans to develop a communication platform similar to WhatsApp

Yesterday, the Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that they are developing a new and highly secure communication platform. This program will be called as ‘Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE)’ and will be similar to WhatsApp.

The RACE program plans on building a distributed messaging system which can exist completely within a network; provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability of messaging; and also preserve privacy to any participant in the system.

DARPA in the program description mention that "compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for comprising any additional parts of the system."

RACE also mentions that the program will further seek to explore approaches to preserving privacy, such as secure multiparty computation and obfuscated communication protocols.

According to the program description on DARPA’s official website, “The goal of the RACE program is to create a system capable of avoiding large-scale compromise.”

“RACE research efforts will explore: 1) 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; and 2) preventing communications compromise by virtue of obfuscating communication protocols”, the description reads.

For now, the team has not revealed complete details of the project. However, they’ll update the users on any new changes made. Visit DARPA’s official website for more.