While it’s long been possible to peruse the Internet privately using a range of encrypted tools, such measures often demand that browsing speed is sacrificed in order to keep your identity a secret. But now, researchers claim to have developed a method to browse the Web anonymously at the same speed as your standard ISP allows.

That method is called “Hornet”, a high-speed, low-latency onion routing network based on Tor that uses next-generation architecture that makes discovering your identity next to impossible, the BBC reported.

Hornet was developed by Chen Chen of Carnegie Mellon University, together with Daniele Enrico Asoni, David Barrera, George Danezis and Adrian Perrig from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and University College London. Just like the Tor network, Hornet enables end-to-end anonymous channels, only it’s said to be faster and more secure than its predecessor.

The Tor network is probably the most famous anonymity tool. It works by creating “virtual tunnels” that bounce requests through a network of servers scattered all over the world, making it virtually impossible to track your IP address. Tor is popular with activists, journalists, law enforcement agencies and those who wish to access the Deep Web, where they can visit websites such as the now defunct Silk Road dark marketplace. Part of the reason for Tor’s popularity is it’s so simple to use. Just download the Tor browser or a software extension and you’re ready to go.

The only problem with Tor is that bouncing your requests across its scattered servers slows your browsing speed down to a crawl, and if your Internet speed is already on the slow side, it can cause painfully long waiting times.

But Hornet claims to have solved the speed problem, and is capable of processing anonymous Web traffic at speeds of up to 93 GB/s.

Hornet’s capabilities are explained in the following whitepaper: HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer, where its creaors explain how they implemented its router logic within an Intel software router alongside a Python langauge Hornet client. Unlike other onion routers, Hornet “doesn’t perform computationally expensive operations for data forwarding”, and as such it can scale with no limits. Meanwhile, it uses symmetric cryptography to allow traffic to be processed at higher speeds, and each node can “process traffic for a practically unlimited number of sources.”

“It is designed to be highly efficient: instead of keeping state at each relay, connection state (such as onion layer decryption keys) is carried within packet headers, allowing intermediate nodes to quickly forward traffic for large numbers of clients,” the paper states. “For all data packets within the session, Hornet nodes use only symmetric cryptography to retrieve their state, process the AHDR and onion-decrypt (or encrypt) the payload.”

Hornet also raises the security bar further, because the paper states that an attacker needs to control “a significant percentage of ISPs” in multiple geopolitical areas and remain undetected while doing so, in order to spy on its users.

Hornet, which is notably yet to be peer reviewed, could looks set to prove popular with privacy advocates. Even so, it’s unlikely to go down well with the political establishment, with figures like the UK’s prime minister David Cameron recently calling for a ban on encryption, saying that such systems only play into the hands of terrorists.

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