Next week, top eggheads will unveil a new anonymizing internet tool that they claim is snoop-proof and faster and more reliable against attack than Tor.

Dubbed Riffle, the system was developed by MIT and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. It uses the same onion-encryption system as Tor, which wraps messages in layers of encryption as they travel through the anonymizing network to disguise the route they've taken.

Like Tor, Riffle [paper PDF] runs connections through a mix network of nodes, bouncing packets from system to system to obscure the origin. What separates Riffle from Tor is that the former has extra defenses to potentially prevent spies from unmasking its users.