Our Products and How They Work
The Internet has created a wonderful new world of information exchange. For the first time in history, men and women can communicate with almost any other person in the world, regardless of distance and almost without cost. This is a new, intimate and immensely hopeful set of abilities.
Unfortunately, it also works in reverse: Criminals and spies world-wide are now able to grab any data you send to anyone. That includes the personal information that is attached to all of your Internet surfing and to all of your emails.
Criminals breaking into your computer was yesterday’s problem. It still matters, and you still need a firewall, but crooks don’t need to break into your computer – you’re sending all of that data through the Internet anyway. It’s easier to pick it up in transit.
Our products
To protect your Internet traffic from the thieves and spies, we provide two types of products:
- Personal anonymous accounts.
- Commercial CryptoRouters.
Personal Anonymous Accounts
Our Road Warrior account, our primary personal account, is software that allows your computer to connect through our anonymity network, anonymizing everything you do on the Internet. The software takes about ten minutes to install; after that, you can do everything as you already have – there are no special commands or restrictions. You can continue to use all your existing passwords and email accounts.
We give all Road Warrior clients access to our secure mail and chat systems, but you don’t have to use them, and you can continue to use your existing email accounts either way.
CryptoRouters
Our CryptoRouters provide the same type of protection as Road Warrior accounts, but they protect an entire office at once. They also include higher traffic and speed capacities (and cost considerably more).
We have two router types: Professional and Enterprise.
- Professional routers are designed for a small-to-medium sized office.
- Enterprise routers are sized for a large office and includes the ability to create a closed-group network (CGN), which is a private dark network for your office and all associated users, wherever they are in the world.
How Our Products Work
There are two critical parts of our service:
- The VPN connection.
- The anonymity network.
The VPN Connection
A VPN is a Virtual Private Network, which is a connection from your computer, through your Internet Service Provider
(your local phone or cable company), to our network. Here’s what that looks like:
This type of connection is often called a "tunnel," because it tunnels through your ISP. Your traffic still
passes through your Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it is encrypted, so there is no intelligible information
that can be seen, just a long string of gibberish that looks something like this:
FK9Hs1uYFt7hOpSJUHlmYcrHjXdHrnUiFB3bM/36Ceq8OBcNDyYzGKgdieFvokId
3a9tA32uS0yrKEsxDZTItv/7ZJoj5H+D1CsU+bnnGwRy3I5vHytFDRnJOFpn2wFc
rUp7rSavV65tirOlagEIvf/AODY9yGH22HY75ChCPo9SP9P3SOvm1nEkBbDd6WK9
aMhAbZf5y1Rs6iCkRG2EHADlXupU2AIctC0SGZieYNF...
The Anonymity Network
The VPN tunnel shown above is a fine technology, but it isn’t enough to beat professional snoops and thieves. By watching the traffic that comes to your ISP and matching it with what comes out the other side of the tunnel, they can pick up the trail without much trouble.
In order to beat professional surveillance, two more steps are required:
- Obscuring the traffic much better.
- Removing your "return address."
In this illustration, the client is in the US and a VPN tunnel runs from their computer to one of our entry nodes in either Canada or Panama, where the return address is also stripped-off. This means that a single surveillance operation is likely to lose the traffic here.
Then, the traffic goes through one or more cascades. Think of this as a Mixmaster for data.
Finally, it comes out the other side in still another jurisdiction, where Cryptohippie’s return address is added, so the sites you visit can respond to you (anonymously).
There is more to our operation than this (we do a few exotic things like rotating IP addresses), but the basics are illustrated here. The network is the key to the operation, and it is the thing that separates us from simple VPNs and proxies.
A network of this type allows you to surf the web, use voice communications like Skype, email, chat, download files, etc., while remaining anonymous. At any point, it can be seen that signals are being sent, but the point of origin (and with it your identity) remains unknown.