I hadn’t heard of this until I read a blog post from Jeff Hayes about it (the excerpt is from the eweek article):
HP security researchers are presenting Veiled, a darknet or private file-sharing and communications network, at Black Hat. Veiled can be accessed by any device with a browser, from a PC to an iPhone.
This sounds like a very intriguing idea for personal users. But as a corporate goon, this definitely has me giving a small groan.* Truly, while those of us really plugged in get older and deeper into the workforce and expect to be able to use our computers nearly as freely as we do our home ones, advances like this give more credence to tighter controls at the workplace. Security is not just about us vs Bad Guys, but also stemming the tendency of information to be free and widespread. (A strange duality if you think about it! And even stranger for those thinking in terms of global [macroscopic] security!)
I’ll be looking forward to more details from Hoffman and Wood as their BlackHat presentation date passes. This is certainly an intriguing development.
* Yes, even I know plenty of ways to bypass restrictions we’ve put in place, but it’s the “average user” that I am most worried about. Technically-savvy users are sometimes intentionally malicious, but I feel “average users” are far more often accidentally malicious. (This is backed only by my own intuition.)