Recent concerns surrounding autonomous AI-driven cyberattacks signal a fundamental shift: AI agents are turning the Internet into a Dark Forest, where anything visible can be discovered, probed, and exploited at machine speed.
As described in Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, the only reliable survival strategy in such an environment may be invisibility itself.
OpenNHP is an open-source implementation of the Network-infrastructure Hiding Protocol (NHP) — an authenticate-before-connect Zero Trust protocol that makes protected infrastructure inaccessible and undiscoverable to unauthorized entities. Rather than defending visible services, NHP prevents reconnaissance, scanning, and pre-authentication exploitation by hiding network resources until cryptographic authentication succeeds.
For the IETF 126 Hackathon, we're inviting the community to do one thing:
We welcome security researchers, protocol designers, cryptographers, network engineers, DNS/TLS/PKI experts, AI security researchers, and anyone who enjoys attacking assumptions. Potential challenge areas include:
- Discovering protected services without authentication
- Enumerating hidden ports, IP addresses, or domain names
- Bypassing authentication or authorization mechanisms
- Exploiting pre-authentication attack surfaces
- Finding cryptographic weaknesses or protocol design flaws
- Testing resistance to DDoS and scanning attacks
- Evaluating AI-assisted attack techniques
Public adversarial testing, peer review, and running code remain the best tools available for building trustworthy Internet security protocols.
You don't need to be at the IETF meeting in person — remote participation is welcome.
- Register for the IETF 126 Hackathon at registration.ietf.org (free, remote or in-person)
- Read the project entry on the IETF 126 Hackathon wiki
- Set up the environment — clone OpenNHP on GitHub or use the live demo environment
- Attack it — any angle is welcome: reconnaissance, auth bypass, protocol fuzzing, cryptographic analysis, AI-assisted scanning
- Report findings — open a GitHub issue or reach the OpenNHP team directly via the IETF Hackathon chat
Questions? Join the discussion on the [email protected] mailing list.
The OpenNHP Team will be participating in person and welcomes collaborators, critics, and especially skeptics.
Invisible by Default. Accessible Only Through Verification.
Come test whether that's actually true.
Read: The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest →