Tag: qaul.net

Routing and WiFi experimentation

Posted on by spacekookie

The beginning of my work period was pretty busy, not always with Summer of Code things. My mentor math and I had already talked about a lot of the things that needed to happen in order to move qaul.net away from an OLSR based routing protocol and make it extendable as well.

As previously hinted, we are using Rust for the protocol implementation, allowing for easy integrating into the existing C code as well as giving us the option to bit-by-bit rewrite the entire software in Rust, a much more modern and forgiving language. The first thing I tackled was to design a common API for the qaul.net library (libqaul) to use to talk to any networking backend. The routing code holds the state of the network and allows the sending of direct and flooded messages into a network (regardless of implementation under the hood). But to do that we also had to define some common characteristics for nodes and messages.

In the end, a lot of the work was sitting down, going through old notes and determining what our protocol was supposed to do. We looked at existing protocols a lot, thinking about extendability and backwards compatibility. The protocol itself will be binary encoded, although not yet sure which format. There is msgpack, cpnproto/ protobuf as well as some Rust specifics (Rust Object Notation to mention one) to look at. But that shouldn’t actually matter for now. All the versioning and extend-ability are being done in the struct level of the protocol, meaning that we could even switch binary encoding half way through. Keeping the encoding and decoding written in Rust, this is actually incredibly easy with the `From` traits. But I digress…

The protocl we ended up designing can handle any type that already exists in qaul.net, as well as allows for custom user extentions – messages that have a type field and a random binary message payload which allows plugins on both sides to interact with it.

 

So…so far the routing core isn’t doing much routing. But that’s okay, that comes later 🙂 With the networking API in place, we actually have something what we’ve wanted for the last 2 years: a hardware abstraction over any networking backend. The API is implemented in Rust as a trait (think like a Java interface), which makes implementations and even implementation specific code very easy.

The next thing on our todo list is working out how WiFi direct behaves. This is kinda disconnected from the rest of the project, but it’s something that has to happen. For this purpose I’ve written a small demo app (still WIP at the time of this writing), which will let us explore the way that WiFi direct works, how to build mesh groups, etc. These experiments are still ongoing, and we hope to have something to show until the end of the week. I will probably publish a small article on my blog about it – check it out (if you’re reading this in the future 😉 )

All in all, the amount of code written in the first section of GSoC2018 is medium. We have however answered a lot of open questions, have a good plan on how to continue and hope to have more to show off by the time of the next evaluation.

If you’re curious about the progress being made, check out the github repository.

 

Until next time,
Katharina

Designing a userspace routing protocol for qaul.net

Posted on by spacekookie

Hi – my name is Katharina, I’m 24 years old and a computer science student at the HU-Berlin. I’ve done the GSoC2016 before for qaul.net and have been an active contributer for the past 2 years. This year I want to tackle something we’ve been postponing for a while…

qaul.net is a communication app that’s based on Freifunk technologies (namely OLSR) which enables people with no access to the internet to communicate with each other easily, using the devices they already own (phones, tablets, laptops, etc) and without needing to be experts in networking technologies.

Unfortunately qaul.net has an issue, namely OLSR. The routing backend is based on manipulating kernel tables and as such needs to run in root-mode. Which isn’t possible on many devices (such as phones and tablets). Furthermore it makes heavy use of the WiFi adhoc mode which isn’t present anymore in modern phones and tablets, putting in another reason for users having to root their devices.

We want to change this to make installation easier (a simple .apk file could be dropped onto a normal phone) and support newer devices without having to install any kernel-level modules. So that’s the why. What about the how?

Well, that one is a little tricky to be honest. Large parts of the qaul.net core library are based on the fact that routing is handled externally and some parts of the code are even olsr-specific. There are three main parts to this challenge.

  1. Actually designing a resilient, delay-tolerant routing protocol
  2. Building a networking abstraction layer which can handle multiple backends (Adhoc, WiFi-direct, ethernet, etc)
  3. Integrating the new routing core into the rest of the library.

When it comes to designing the protocol we want to let BATMAN inspire us greatly. Each qaul.net node doesn’t need to know the entire topology of the network, only where to roughly send packages for them to be delivered. This also means we can build a delay tolerant system. This module (which I’ve called routing core for now) will be written in Rust, a low-level programming language which can integrate into the rest of the C source code easily, without being as low-level and feature-sparse as C itself. Developing it as a separate module with an API also means that we can take it out of the context of qaul.net and do experiments with it in different settings.

Building a networking abstraction API will require knowledge of different backends. For this we will do experiments with WiFi direct on Android (and maybe iOS if we find hardware) to see how it behaves, how we can build meshes with it, etc. There are a lot of open questions for this which will need to be answered but hopefully at the end of GSoC2018 we’ll have some answers and code to go along with it.

 

I’m excited to get working on this. It has been about two years in planning and with it we can make qaul.net more accessible to more people.

GSoC2016 Wrapping up: A crypto module for qaul.net

Posted on by spacekookie

The last weeks

So it’s been a summer. Wow. It was an amazing experience taking part in this project, I feel like I have learned a lot and I hope that my work will be useful to others.

I want to take this opportunity to highlight what I set out to do and what I achieved in the end. The last weeks were probably the most satisfying bit of the entire project as modules that I had written weeks prior were slotting together seemlessly and things suddently just started to work. At the same time they were also the most frustrating with my code having two bugs that took me almost 2 weeks to finally track down.

Most of my work can be found in this repository, on the qaul_crypto branch.

I did some work on a different project, mildly related to qaul.net which might become useful soon.
Most of what I have done is backend work but there is an example application you can run. The source code compiles and has been tested under Linux (Ubuntu 14.04 and Fedora 24). By running the qaul-dbg binary (under src/client/dbg/qaul-dbg you will create two users (to emulate a communication between two nodes), add their public keys to a keystore and then exchange and verify a signed message. Feel free to play around with the code for this demo, that can be found under src/qaullib/qcry_wrapper.c.

In this final blog post I will talk a bit about what I have done, what it means for the project and how my ~2.2k lines of c-code contribution will affect the future of qaul.net.

What I have done

The basic idea behind my project was to provide a cryptography submodule to qaul.net to make it a safer and more verifiable place to communicate in. Part of that are of course ways to sign and verify messages but at the same time a core aspect of that are also user identities.

The two biggest parts of the crypto module are internally referenced as qcry_arbit and qcry_context. As I have already explained in previous blog posts, those are the Arbiter (which provides a static API to use in the rest of the library) and the Context which holds the actual “magic” of signatures, identities, keys and targets. In an earlier diagram there was a dispatcher. However due to testing the functions, it was deemed “overkill” and the functionality was integrated into the arbiter, meaning less abstraction layers and more flat code (which is always easier to understand and maintain).

With the arbiter in place it is now possible to create unique users with a unique fingerprint that can be shared on the network to identify people as well as sign and verify messages. What has also been done is provide new message types for OLSR (the routing protocoll used in qaul.net) to propagate this new information among nodes.

What I haven’t yet done

Unfortunately there were some delays due to problems with the main crypto library in use in the project as well as a few bugs that really slowed down progress in the last few weeks. Due to that the entire encryption part has been delayed. There are functions planned and partially provided to take care of these tasks however no code behind them yet to implement it.

The feature is currently in planning and will land in a later patch, probably after the initial merge of the module has gone through as there are a lot of things to be taken care of.

Current state

Initial User signup dialogue

As said above, it is currently possible to create users, sign and verify messages and to flood the users fingerprint as well as public key to other users. However this doesn’t address a few problems that we have had while integrating the arbiter API into the rest of libqaul. Due to technical limitations in the communication system it’s currently not possible to sign private messages. This is due to how the communication subsystem works; which is currently being redesigned from scratch.

This means that any merge that will go through now will need to be adjusted to work with a new communication backend in a few weeks. As such, it is a bit unclear when exactly and how the crypto code will be merged. I am looking forward to working with the team on resolving these issues. And am also looking forward to a new shiny communication backend. But for now it means that merging the code I’ve written for the Summer of Code might be difficult.

New message types were added as well to provide a way to exchange these new payloads (signatures, public keys, fingerprints, etc) without breaking backwards compatibility with older nodes. What happens is that new nodes send out both a new and an old hello message. Other new nodes ignore the old hello message and can address the new node via it’s fingerprint and use verifiable channels of communication while old nodes are oblivious to any change. Until they are updated 🙂

In conclusion

The Google Summer of Code brought qaul.net a very big step closer to being a more safe and secure place to communicate on. The crypto submodule is tested and easy to use. What might happen is that parts of the code get merged (the crypto submodule itself) without merging any of the code that hooks into the communication stack.

There are still things to be optimisised, probably some hidden bugs to be fixed and there definately is some work needed to make private messaging actually private.

This might be the end of the Summer of Code and a “final evaluation” for this part of the project but I am by no means done. I was interested in open source software before, wrote my own projects, contributed small chunks of code to other people. But this is the first time I have been deeply involved in a large community project and the first time I learned to deal with integrating with other peoples code. And it is very largely due to the Summer of Code, Freifunk and my mentor.

I had a lot of fun working on this project and I am looking forward to more contributions. Even if it was frustrating and very stressfuly at times I’m glad to have participated. The experience tought me a lot about communication in teams, software development and funnily enough signature alignments 🙂

Acknowledgements

First of all I want to thank my mentor Mathias Jud to have introduced me to qaul.net and the Google Summer of Code. I also want to thank him for his support and guidance with problems I had while interfacing the arbiter with the rest of libqaul.

In addition I want to thank saces, another member of the qaul.net team who helped me in resolving dependency issues as well as problems I caused in the build system which prevented my code from building on Windows (woops).

Lastly want to thank Freifunk for providing me with this opportunity as well as Google for organising and sponsoring the Summer of Code projects.

Sharable Plugin System for qaul.net – Midterm Updates

Posted on by AnuV

Hi everyone, 

As we are on the midterm evaluation process, I would like to share what I have done so far. I created a small HTML5 application to share the location of a user, it uses geolocation API for this purpose. This will work online but, if we are offline it will work only if the device had a browser which communicated directly with the GPS hardware. This is how the application looks like when the location is found out:

As per my plan I was supposed to create a JSON API the application can use to send the request to the web server of qaul.net and a new message type for all the plugins in general. But it is not yet completed, so I have created a button in the message page of qaul.net GUI which will invoke the Javascript function to get the location of the user and it will be sent using the existing message type. There’s more work to be done for the proper working of the plugin mechanism in the qaul.net. Currently the location of the user is sent as longitude and latitude manner in the messaging system as shown below.

Cheers,

Anu

Sharable Plugin System for qaul.net

Posted on by AnuV

Hi everyone,

I’m Anu Vazhayil, exchange student at University of Paderborn from India. I am one of the Google Summer of Code participant for the project qaul.net. 

Qaul.net is a mesh network communication app which can be run in Linux, OSX, Windows and Android. It can be used to send text messages, file sharing and even make voice calls with people who are connected to this network without being connected to internet or cellular networks. There is also a feature to share your internet with the other users connected to the qaul.net network. All this makes it a cool app which everyone will feel to try atleast onceWink.  If you have not installed it in your system, you can still connect to the network via web interface after connecting to a wifi.

As part of the GSoC project, we are planning to extend the usability of the messaging system of qaul.net. The messaging system can be used as a communication layer for other purposes like location sharing, sending contacts etc. Such apps/extensions can be downloaded by the user as a zipped file which will automatically get downloaded to the web plugin directory available to the web server. It also proposes an additional feature to share the installed plugins with other users in the network over file sharing.

The following needs to be implemented for the project:

  • Plugin API: to describe the features of a library and how to interact with it. It defines a mechanism to use the messaging system for plugins and give it access to the qaul.net topology.
  • Plugin structure: a zipped folder with a special extension that can be shared with other users in the network over file sharing.
  • Plugin management function: Installation and plugin sharing. Once the Plugin is installed, it is copied and extracted to a directory in the web server.
  • Sample Plugin: Share the location details of the user. It will have access to the user’s location through the API implemented.
Mockup UI
Stay tuned for my next blog posts with the updates regarding my projectLaughing. I will also update my blog: https://captanu.wordpress.com/ in the coming days. Our coding period starts today so, I wish All the best to other GSoC students too. Happy coding everyone!
Cheers!

Provide a cryptographic implementation for Qaul.net

Posted on by spacekookie

Hey there,

my name is Katharina (aka spacekookie) and I am one of the Google Summer of Code participants for Freifunk projects; qaul.net in particular.

I wanted to write up a short article on what it is I will be doing this summer, how I will do it and what I hope to achieve. This will be one of three articles published on this blog.

Qaul.net provides a mesh-wifi network for people to connect and share information to other people on the network. Like freifunk it uses the OLSR mesh routing library. But unlike freifunk it’s main goal isn’t to connect to the www-internet but rather create a network of it’s own on which people can communicate, share data and come together. No centralised infrastructure required.

Currently all traffic on qaul.net is sent in the clear which is…suboptimal. For one nothing said on the network is in any sense of the word “private”. On the other there is no way to verify identities. And that’s what my Summer of Code project is about.

The changes to the qaul.net code base required are quite extensive but with a bit of clever planning shouldn’t break too many things. The core thing required is an abstraction layer between user and network.

Currently a user gives their node a nickname and that’s then them. “Identify verification” (if you want to call it that Tongue Out) is done by checking IP addresses against nick-names. Man in the middle attacks are very easy in such a network and the only defense is the benevolence of its users.

What I thus plan to do is introduce an abstraction layer between a node, routing and what a user sees. A “user identity” which can be shared between different nodes (but doesn’t have to be), something that can be written to an addressbook and is later on verifiably the same and will make users aware if their are being man-in-the-middled, which is now much easier to verify.

In addition to that I plan to introduce asymmetric encryted messages, completely transparent to the user. While qaul.net can flood a message acress the network that should be seen by as many people as possible, there should be the ability for two people on the network to talk to each other without anybody else knowing what they’re talking about.

What’s planned is something that resembles PGP. A users identify will be their master-private key fingerprint. From that each node gets a subkey-pair (public and private). The public key will be flooded into the network for people to use to write messages to that node. The private will be unique to the node. And when sending messages to another person people can either choose “all” which means that the messages is encrypted against all (non-revoked) public keys of the target identity or choose a specific node to talk to. This implementation also allows for mailing list style group discussions.

 

Through Google Summer of Code I hope to become a regular contributer to qaul.net as I am a big fan of the project ideas. I also hope that my contributions will make it a much safer place to communicate and share information on.

As already mentioned I will be updating this blog two more times: one around the half-way point of the project and one as a wrap-up of how it all went.

If you’re interested in reading more of my insane ramblings about the project, maybe micro updates and what not, check out my personal blog https://spacekookie.de or go directly to the GSOC category.

 

Until another day,

Katharina/ spacekookie