Paraweb: The Hidden World Wide Web

The World Wide Paraweb is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents while enabling undetected and/or deniable posting, hosting, and browsing.

Paraweb creates a new instance of the World Wide Web by encoding itself steganographically in existing application-layer content, especially social network content. Essentially, Paraweb treats the high-throughput, high-degree application layer of the modern World Wide Web as a new, virtualized physical layer of a hidden network embedded in the public one.

For example, users could surf Twitter (X) as regular users. If they are aware that a Twitter-hosted image contains encrypted Paraweb content, they could decode that content and follow any PHTTP links or instructions within it to new Paraweb content. This new Paraweb content would be similarly hosted in the larger World Wide Web. Assuming that outside observers are unaware of Paraweb's existence, their traffic would be similar to existing traversals of the web and social networks. Even assuming that outside observers are aware of Paraweb's existence, their traffic would allow plausible deniability of the user's knowledege and use of Paraweb's existence, since the traffic would remain simlar to existing, first-order users of the web or social networks.

Technical

The World Wide Web is built on three technologies

  1. Uniform Resource Locators (URL): a globally unique location specification for documents on the World Wide Web.
  2. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP): an application layer protocol for sending documents on the World Wide Web.
  3. HyperText Markup Language (HTML): a standardized markup language for encoding documents on the World Wide Web.

Paraweb implicitly uses these technologies to simulate a new internet built invisibly on top of the existing internet. Paraweb is therefore equivalently built on three technologies:

  1. Paraweb Resource Locators (PRL): instructions for specifying locations in the Paraweb.
    • These instructions can take a variety of forms, including:
      1. Direct URL-style links to an encoding locations
      2. Human-level instructions for searching, navigating to, filtering, identifying, and decoding Paraweb-hosting resources, while maintaining regular usage patterns for the embedding network or site.
    • Regardless of their form, the two essential and completely independent components of a PRL are:
      1. Instructions for traversing the World Wide Web to the location of the Paraweb-hosting resource.
      2. Instructions for decoding the Paraweb content embedded in the HTTP URL. If no instructions are provided, the decoding process may be assumed to be identical to that of the souce Paraweb location.
  2. Paraweb HyperText Transfer Protocol (PHTTP): instructions for identifying and decoding Paraweb resources from their host locations.
  3. HTML: once located and decoded, World Wide Web and Paraweb document encoding is identical.