HOPR Explores Acurast to Scale Network Privacy
Eliminating Centralized Weak Points in Privacy Networks
A decentralized privacy network protects data and metadata by eliminating reliance on central authorities, reducing surveillance risks, and enhancing security. By distributing traffic across independent nodes, it ensures anonymity, resilience, and true data privacy in an increasingly digital world.
At Acurast, we are conducting a joint exploration with HOPR to decentralize cover traffic generation using our decentralized cloud compute network. The research aims to evaluate how Acurast enhances HOPR’s privacy guarantees by reducing reliance on centralized servers for cover traffic.
The Challenge: Centralized Cover Traffic
HOPR is a decentralized privacy network designed to protect metadata by routing internet traffic through a global mixnet. In simple terms, HOPR provides its users with a way to communicate online without revealing their personal or private information, such as IP address, location, communication patterns, or timing of messages. It achieves this by relaying data through multiple independent nodes, adding background “cover traffic,” and encrypting metadata — making it extremely difficult for observers to analyze network activity or trace communications.
Cover traffic plays a crucial role by adding constant background noise to the network, making it difficult for observers to distinguish real messages from fake ones. This prevents traffic analysis, protects user anonymity, and ensures that no personal information can be inferred from network activity.
Ensuring truly decentralized cover traffic is essential for privacy and security. Our joint research investigates how Acurast helps eliminate reliance on a limited number of servers, enhance resilience, and reduce trust dependencies.
This is particularly important with the launch of Gnosis VPN: a decentralized, trustless, uncensorable VPN for the web3 age expected to start towards the end of the year. Gnosis VPN is developed by HOPR, and runs over the HOPR mixnet. Providing strong privacy guarantees for users of Gnosis VPN and other services on top of the HOPR mixnet requires consistent, stable and trustworthy cover traffic provision.
How Acurast Can Enhance HOPR’s Privacy Infrastructure
The goal is to determine how Acurast can cover traffic in a decentralized way that improves privacy guarantees.
By shifting the cover traffic from centralized servers to Acurast’s decentralized, secure processor network, we believe cover traffic could become more credibly neutral, harder to trace, and resistant to collusion or surveillance — strengthening HOPR’s overall privacy approach.
Impact on HOPR’s Privacy Network
This research should bring the following benefits:
- Greater Decentralization: Shifts cover traffic generation from a few centralized servers to a globally distributed network of devices, reducing single points of failure or trust.
- Stronger Privacy Guarantees: Makes it significantly harder for adversaries to correlate traffic or compromise anonymity, even under global surveillance.
- Credible Neutrality: Ensures that no single party, including the HOPR Association, controls the background noise, reinforcing trust in the system.
A Shared Vision for Privacy-Preserving Communication
This collaboration is an exciting step toward exploring how decentralized cloud computing can support real-world privacy applications.
In the future, Acurast and HOPR will explore deeper technical integrations to enhance decentralized privacy solutions further. This can include leveraging Acurast’s distributed computing capabilities for more robust metadata protection or integrating additional privacy-preserving mechanisms that strengthen network resilience. Both teams share a vision of advancing secure, decentralized communication.
We are excited to contribute to a more decentralized and private internet.
About HOPR
HOPR is a decentralized mixnet that ensures complete data and metadata privacy by routing traffic through multiple hops. Its proof-of-relay mechanism rewards node runners with HOPR tokens for securely relaying data. With a custom layer-two scaling solution, HOPR enables decentralized settlement without high fees. HOPR is currently developing Gnosis VPN for Gnosis DAO to bring users a fully trustless, decentralized, and uncensorable VPN service fit for the web3 era.
About Acurast
Acurast is a truly decentralized, scalable, and secure compute network powered by smartphones, driving a mobile-powered disruption for decentralized, confidential, and accessible compute. Acurast redefines decentralized compute from the ground up — starting with smartphones, which are the most battle-tested phones worldwide, trusted by billions. With built-in TEEs and top-tier HSMs, they surpass traditional servers in security.
Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram | Documentation
