Tag: Software

SWOON: Simultaneous Wireless Organic Optimization within Nodewatcher – in the middle of the road.

Posted on by David Marn

Hi everyone,

This is my first update on working on SWOON, an algorithm to automatically allocate channels to nodes in nodewatcher. Not a lot of time has passed since I started working and but the wlanslovenija community was immensely helpful in getting me started. Up to now, I only worked on my own coding projects, where I got to be the main architect behind the codebase. I decided where functions were defined, I decided on the coding style, I did code reviews and I was the one to approve branch merges (of which there were none, because I wrote all the code 🙂 ). Now, GSoC threw me in the middle of a well established open source project where you have to get accustomed to existing coding practices. And accustoming to this was more difficult than I expected. So people from wlanslovenija had to be really patient with me (and I think they’ll have to keep this up for a while 🙂 ). But I slowly got the hang of it. My overarching plan for the algorithm is to first read the data, then process the data and finally issue a warning to those who maintain nodes with inefficient channel allocations. My work on reading the data from nodes is almost done (almost because a new amazing feature was suggested only yesterday!). On a tangent, I think this shows another immense benefit of community oriented projects – everyone’s free to suggest additional features that would make this process more eficient. To get the data about neighboring nodes, one has to temporarily turn the wireless radios off. Because of that, nodewatcher-agent only performs a survey of neighbors every two hours. But we collect data much more regularly. So how do we deal with this? My current implementation simply stores the data into the database every hour and it does not take into account the age of the data. I will now work on comparing the current datapoint with the latest one and only insert it into the datastream if the data has changed. This will reduce the space we’re using and could even be expanded for use by other modules. It’s great to know that you can contribute to any aspect of the project. Mitar, a senior developer of nodewatcher, said that they built all of it themselves, so we can rewrite anything as well.

I also worked on a parallel implementation of the mechanism, which read the data from old dumps. This gave me the insight into the architecture that made writing the actual implementation much easier.

My next steps are to finish the data collection part and create a module to analyze this data. This is exciting for everyone because there’s no documentation about writing such modules so I’ll get to be the first one to do it! I can only hope I’ll document it well enough to make the process easier for those who will follow as new members in the community. The github PR can be found here.

Google Summer of Code 2016: External netifd Device Handlers – Milestone 1

Posted on by ArneKappen

OVERVIEW OF THE LAST WEEKS
During the last 5 to 6 weeks I have implemented the possibility to include wireless interfaces in Open vSwitch bridges, rewritten a lot of the code for creating bridges with external device handlers and brought my development environment up to speed. I am now working with an up-to-date copy of the LEDE repository.
I have also implemented the possibility for users of external device handlers to define what information and statistics of their devices look like and to query the external device handler for that data through netifd.

CHANGES TO THE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT
So far, I have been using quilt to create and manage patches for my alterations of the netifd code.
One day they were completely broken. I still do not know what and how it happened but it was not the first time and this time recovery would have been way too tedious.
This is why I switched to a git-only setup. I now have a clone of the netifd repo on my development machine that is symlinked into the LEDE source tree using the nice ‘enable package source tree override’ option in the main Makefile. I used the oppportunity to update both the LEDE source tree and the netifd repository to the most recent versions.
Before, I was working on an OpenWRT Chaos Calmer tree, because of a bug causing the Open vSwitch package to segfault with more recent kernels.
Now, everything is up-to-date: LEDE, netifd and Open vSwitch.

MY PROGRESS IN DETAIL

More Dynamic Device Creation
In actual coding news, I have refined the callback mechanism for creating bridges with external device handlers and the way they are created and brought up.
Previously, a bridge and its ports were created and activated immediately when /etc/config/network was parsed. Now, the ubus call is postponed until the first port on the bridge is brought up.
Because of the added asynchronicity, I had to add a ‘timeout and retry’-mechanism to keep track of the state of the structures in netifd and the external device handler.

A few questions have come up regarding the device handler interface. As I have explained in my first blog post, I am working on Open vSwitch integration into LEDE writing an external device handler called ovsd. Obviously, this is very useful for testing as well.
I have come across the issue of wanting to disable an bridge without deleting it. This means bringing down the bridge and removing the L2 devices from it. The device handler interface that I mirror for my ubus methods doesn’t really have a method for this. The closest thing is ‘hotplug remove’, which using feels a bit like a dirty hack to me.
I have reached out no netifd’s maintainer about this issue. For the meantime, I stick to (ab)using the hotplug mechanism.

On the ovsd side I have added a pretty central feature: OpenFlow controllers. Obviously, someone who uses Open vSwitch bridges is likely to want to use its SDN capabilities.
Controllers can be configured directly in /etc/config/network with the UCI option ‘ofcontrollers’:

config interface ‘lan’
        option ifname ‘eth0’
        option type ‘Open vSwitch’
        option proto ‘static’
        option ipaddr ‘1.2.3.4’
        option gateway ‘1.2.3.1’
        option netmask ‘255.255.255.0’
        option ofcontrollers ‘tcp:1.2.3.4:5678’
        option controller_fail_mode ‘standalone’

The format in which the controllers are defined is exactly the one the ovs-vsctl command line tool expects.
The other new UCI option below ofcontrollers configures the bridge’s behavior in case the configured controller is unreachable. It is a direct mapping to the ovs-vsctl command ‘set-fail-mode’. The default behavior in case of controller absence is called ‘standalone’ which makes the Open vSwitch behave like a learning switch. ‘secure’ disables the adding of flows if no controller is present.

Function Coverage: Information and Statistics
Netifd device handlers have functions to dump information and statistics about devices in JSON format: ‘dump_info’ and ‘dump_stats’. Usually, these just collect data from the structures in netifd and the kernel but with my external device handlers, it is not as simple. I have to relay the query to an external device handler program and parse the response. Since the interface is generic, I cannot hard-code the fields and types in the response. This is why I relied once more on the JSON data type description mechanism that I have already used for dynamic creation of device configuration descriptions.
In addition to the mandatory ‘config’ description, users can now optionally provide ‘info’ and/or ‘stats’ fields. Just like the configuration descriptions they are stored in the stub device handler structs within netifd where they are available to serve as blueprints for how information and statistics coming from external device handlers have to be parsed.

For my Open vSwitch setup, it currently looks like this in /lib/netifd/ubusdev-config/ovsd.json:
{
    “name” : “Open vSwitch”,
    “ubus_name” : “ovs”,
    “bridge” : “1”,
    “br-prefix” : “ovs”, 
    “config” : [
        [“name”, 3],
        [“ifname”, 1],
        [“empty”, 7],
        [“parent”, 3],
        [“ofcontrollers”, 1],
        [“controller_fail_mode”, 3],
        [“vlan”, 6]
    ],
    “info” : [
        [“ofcontrollers”, 1],
        [“fail_mode”, 3],
        [“ports”, 1]
    ]
}

This is how it looks when I query the Open vSwitch bridge ‘ovs-lan’:

THE NEXT STEPS

During the weeks to come I want to look into some issues which occurred sometimes when I disabled and re-enabled a bridge: Some protocol-realated configuration went missing. This could mean that sometimes the configured IP address was gone. Something which could help me overcome the problem is also in need of some work: reloading/reconfiguring devices.
Along with this, I want to get started with the documentation to prepare for the publication of the source code.

Overview: GSoC projects at freifunk.net

Posted on by Andreas Bräu

In 2016 we found 9 students doing Google Summer of Code projects for freifunk. This is an overview on all our projects including links to repositories and further information:

Title Student Repository Project information
A schema-based configuration system for OpenWrt Neoraider  https://gitlab.com/neoraider/ece  
DynaPoint – A dynamic access point validator and creator for OpenWrt Asco  https://github.com/thuehn/dynapoint
https://github.com/thuehn/luci-app-dynapoint 		  
Implementing Pop-Routing Gabriel https://github.com/gabri94/poprouting http://firenze.ninux.org/
Monitoring and quality assurance of open wifi networks: the client view Tarek https://git.nordwest.freifunk.net/ffnw-firmware/monitoring-drone   
netifd extension: external device handlers arkap    
OpenWrt – poWquty (poWer quality) Neez   https://github.com/thuehn/powquty https://github.com/neez34/
Provide a cryptographic implementation for Qaul.net spacecookie  https://github.com/spacekookie/qaul.net  https://spacekookie.de/gsoc2016/
Sharable Plugin System for qaul.net – Mesh Network Communication App Anu  https://github.com/anuvazhayil/qaul.net https://github.com/anuvazhayil 
SWOON: Simultaneous Wireless Organic Optimization within Nodewatcher marn 

https://github.com/CdavM/nodewatcher

https://github.com/CdavM/swoon 

  

Blog posts on these projects you can find with the tag GSocC 2016. Use the RSS feed to receive all updates. You can also see our projects from previous summers.

GSoC 2016 Introduction: external device handlers for netifd

Posted on by ArneKappen

HELLO WORLD

It’s time I started blogging about my Google Summer of Code project with Freifunk.

To begin, let me introduce myself. I am Arne, computer science student at TU Berlin and pursuing my Bachelor’s degree. This is my first GSoC — and the first time I contribute to an Open Source software project, so, naturally, I’m pretty excited to get to know the process.

My project aims at extending OpenWRT/LEDE’s network interface daemon (netifd).

I’ve familiarize myself with the inner workings of netifd while I was working on a student project last semester. The result of that student project will assist me in realizing the GSoC project. Moreover, the existing source code will partially build the foundation of the new device handler which will be realized in this project.

 

THE PROJECT

Here’s the general idea: Netifd allows the user — as the name suggests — to create and configure network devices and interfaces. Per device class, there is a hard-coded structure called a ‘device handler’. Each device handler exposes an interface for operations such as creation or re-configuration of device instances of its class.

The point I’m tackling is the structures hard-codedness. Today, whenever someone wants to introduce a new device class, is necessary to alter the netifd code base and maintain these changes. The proposed mechanism allows to realize external device handlers as separate programs communicating via the bus system ubus. Accordingly, to introduce a new device class into netifd, one just needs to implement device handling logic and link it to netifd. Thus, no maintenance — or knowledge of the innermost workings of netifd — is necessary.

Building on my work from the aforementioned class I’ll write a device handler to integrate Open vSwitch support into OpenWRT/LEDE using netifd. The ‘ovsd’ as it is called will relay calls to the device handler interface via the ‘ovs-vsctl’ command line utility to set up Open vSwitch bridges and ports.

 

MY DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT

I am hosting my code in a git repository that’s included in the GitLab of the INET department which is employing me at TU Berlin. Once the code becomes usable, it will appear on GitHub here.

We also have a repository providing an OpenWRT/LEDE feed that bundles the Open vSwitch software with ovsd: (link will follow)

 

Testing is done on a PC Engines Alix 2 board which is part of our testbed:

 

WHERE I AM AT

As of today I have realized a mechanism to generate device handler stubs within netifd when the daemon is first started and before it parses /etc/config/network. The device class’ parameters, such as its name in the ubus system and most importantly the format of its configuration, are stored in JSON files in /lib/netifd/ubusdev-config/. The logic to parse a configuration format from JSON files existed already within netifd but was only used for protocol handlers before. I adapted it to generate device handlers dynamically.

When such a device handler is generated, it subscribes to its corresponding external device handler using ubus. This way, the latter can generate events asynchronously for the former to react to.

In order for this to work, the external device handler must be up and running before netifd attempts the subscription.

I also realized a simple proof-of-concept implementation that works in one simple case: create an ovs-bridge with one or more interfaces like this example /etc/config/network file demonstrates:

 

config interface ‘lan’

    option ifname ‘eth0’

    option type ‘ovs’

    option proto ‘static’

    option ipaddr ‘172.17.1.123’

    option gateway ‘172.17.1.1’

    option netmask ‘255.255.255.0’

This will create an Open vSwitch bridge called ‘ovs-lan’ with the port ‘eth0’ — and that’s about all it does right now. Error handling is missing and more complex options like setting OpenFlow controllers or adding wireless interfaces don’t work yet.

 

THE ROAD AHEAD

Among the first things I’ll tackle when GSoC’s coding phase begins are adding the possibilities to incorporate WiFi-interfaces to the bridges created with external device handlers and introducing the missing parts of the device handler interface. Since I’m dealing with netifd and the external device handler which is an independent process running asynchronously, getting their state to stay in sync will take some work. I need to think about the way the callback system that comes with ubus’ pubsub-mechanism will function. In the end, it is supposed to be abstract enough to work not only for my Open vSwitch use case but for any external device handler.

Then, further into the coding phase, I want to increase feature coverage of the Open vSwitch options, so that users can assign OpenFlow controllers for their bridges like so:

 

config interface ‘lan’

    option ifname ‘eth0’

    option type ‘ovs’

    option proto ‘static’

    option ipaddr ‘172.17.1.123’

    option gateway ‘172.17.1.1’

    option netmask ‘255.255.255.0’

    option of-controller ‘1.2.3.4:5678’

In the end I would like to have the mechanism implemented and documented so that others can build on it. Documenting my work is especially important to me, because I found myself frustrated with the scarcity of the netifd documentation more than once before. I wish for my code to become a part of OpenWRT/LEDE and be extended and improved in the future and I would like to make it easy for anyone insterested to doing that with a helpful manual and commented code.

I’m excited to get started and hope to find the time to blog about my progress here, regularly.

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!

OpenWrt – poWquty (poWer quality): Computing and providing power quality information on OpenWrt routers.

Posted on by Neez El Sayed

Dear Freifunkers,

Please allow me to introduce the poWquty Project within Google Summer of Code 2016 at Freifunk.

The big picture behind this project relates to the energy production and consumption. Sustainable energy production and consumption are crucial for a prospering life on earth. The importance of energy led many theorists to even define the level of civilization by its energy profile. With the renewable energies shift the energy production paradigm from centralized to decentralized energy production which poses one of the next big challenges, which will influence the energy production in the future years.

From the big picture we move to the concrete case, increasingly faced when dealing with renewable energies: monitoring and control.
The emerging smart grids include an inherent need for communication for monitoring and control purposes in a more and more dynamic environment. One of the major challenges is monitoring the power quality parameters in a decentralized manner. In such case, decentralized information need to be retrieved and transported with the lowest latency possible. One way to solve this challenge could be to install expensive infrastructure to each point. The better way is to use wireless mesh infrastructure that could also serve this purpose.

Here where Freifunk comes in: The Freifunk mesh network is an outstanding example for a decentralized infrastructure that could be augmented with grid related functionalities to cope with future energy challenges. In order to use wireless mesh networks such as Freifunk for energy monitoring, we could use extra hardware that does the power measurements and use the wireless networks solely for transporting the information. The drawback of this is the need to install separate hardware. But, since all routers run on power, we could integrate the measurements into the router, which is the main goal of this project: to enable power quality measurements on OpenWrt.

Here is the initial plan how to do this. First we need to retrieve voltage samples from the power grid. For the beginning we will rely on an oscilloscope device that delivers the real time samples over a USB interface. This way voltage samples from the electric socket are retrieved at the router. With these voltage samples we can go ahead and calculate the power quality parameters, using moving window algorithms, fourrier transform, and z-transform to get the phase angle, the effective power, the frequency, and the harmonics. This calculation should be time, and memory efficient since it has to run on the OpenWrt embedded devices. Once these values are calculated we need to think about how we want to make them available for retrieval over IP networks.

Now we come to the Code: The goal of the project is to create an OpenWrt package which ensures three functionalities:
1-    Retrieving sample data from the measurement device
2-    Calculating power quality parameters form the retrieved samples
3-    Provisioning of the calculated parameters for retrieval

This project is intended to strengthen the role of open software in the uprising smart grids by providing some essential functionalities, communication devices need to have in the context of smart grids, especially in regard to the future role of the home routers in the future energy solutions.

More updates on this will follow in the next weeks.

Cheers,

Neez

GSoC: A new configuration system for OpenWrt/LEDE

Posted on by NeoRaider

Hi,
I’m Matthias (aka NeoRaider), and this year, I’ll participate in the Google Summer of Code for the Freifunk project.

The goal of my project is to develop an alternative to the UCI configuration system, as UCI has a number of issues that make it cumbersome to use in some situations.

One of the basic issues of UCI that affects many Freifunk (or generally community mesh) firmwares is the upgrade behaviour. Mesh firmwares usually contain elaborate default configurations, which set up network interfaces and other things to allow participating in a mesh without deep knowledge of the setup.

But this setup needs to change from time to time, as the firmware is upgraded. In the Gluon firmware framework, we usually solve this by providing upgrade scripts which modify the configuration after flashing the firmware. Writing these script is often a tedious task, and the scripts easily break when the configuration differs too much from the expected one.

But the ability to change the configuration is important for many Freifunk users: They want to change the role of ethernet ports, WLAN settings, and a lot more. But UCI doesn’t provide information how a setting was changed: if a script encounters an unexpected value, it can’t find out if it is an old default value, or was changed by the user. This often leads to a difficult choice for the script author: either to overwrite the value unconditionally, maybe disregarding voluntary configuration changes, or not to overwrite it, rendering communities unable to change certain configuration during upgrades.

My project aims at solving this by saving the user configuration independently of the defaults provided by packages. This way, a package upgrade can change the default values, but explicit user configuration will not be affected.

Another issue is that the upgrade scripts are usually part of the packages that bring the configuration. Removing a package will leave the configuration behind, which is usually a good thing (for users which know about this and may be interested in the the old config), but for mostly-automatic upgrades, old configuration may accumulate, which can quickly become problematic on devices with very limited flash.

I plan to fix this by basing the new configuration system on schema definitions, which specify which configuration options and values are valid. The schema will probably be based on JSON, as there are already lots of existing systems for defining JSON schemas, which may be used for my project or at least serve as inspiration. This will also finally provide real datatypes for the configuration and make things more consistent (finally no more 1/true/on/yes/0/false/off/no booleans!). If we want too keep the package/section/option organization of UCI, or rather allow defining schemas for any JSON structure, is still a subject of debate.

Instead of going into detail even more in this post, I’ll provide a link to my Gitlab project: https://gitlab.com/neoraider/ece

Design documents, examples for configuration and schemas, and first code will start to appear there very soon Laughing

DynaPoint – A dynamic access point validator and creator

Posted on by Tobias Ilte

Hi everybody,

 

I am Tobias, a Computer Science student at the TU-Berlin. I am glad to have the opportunity to participate at GSoC for Freifunk this year.

 

My project aims at making the handling with access points in OpenWrt/LEDE easier. The goal is defined as follows: Find an easily configurable solution (with reasonable defaults) for making the wireless access SSID in OpenWrt/LEDE dependent on a set of network conditions.

 

What does that mean? Consider the following example. You have a wireless access point with SSID “Freifunk”. Suddenly for whatever reason the AP looses Internet connectivity without anyone noticing it. When users now connect to this AP, expecting a working Internet connection, they get frustrated, because they can’t check their emails or surf the Internet.

 

With DynaPoint I want to develop a daemon, which regularly monitors the Internet connectivity. When it’s lost, the SSID will automatically be changed. In this example it could be changed to “Freifunk-offline”. When Internet connectivity is re-established, the SSID would automatically be changed back to “Freifunk”.

This way users as well as admins get informed about the state of an access point just by looking at the SSID.

 

To verify Internet connectivity the first obvious step would be to do a ping. For this purpose there already exists a package called pingcheck, which I am planning to use. Further steps could include DNS-Queries and HTTP-Downloads.

 

Speaking about easy configuration and reasonable defaults, I want to require as little configuration steps as possible, but also provide enough configuration options to be adjustable to different kind of setups. Ideally the configuration will also be possible via the LuCI web interface.

 

Until next time,

 

Tobias

SWOON: Simultaneous Wireless Organic Optimization within Nodewatcher

Posted on by David Marn

Hi everyone,

I will contribute to one of the Freifunk projects; nodewatcher, via Google Summer of Code this summer and I wanted to keep you updated on my progress as well as exchange thoughts about my ideas.

First of all, nodewatcher is an open source, modular community oriented platform used for network planning, node deployment, node monitoring and maintenance. nodewatcher was initially developed to be primarily used by the wlan slovenija project. With 1336 nodes, it’s really successful and a great example for community networks. As nodewatcher gets deployed elsewhere with even more nodes, it’s natural to ask ourselves if we can be smarter about allocating spectrum to our wireless nodes – these nodes are mostly inexpensive wireless routers but it’s natural to extend the meaning of the term to dedicated wireless access points (i.e. Unifi AP).

The theoretical foundation for this problem is fascinating by itself: Each node has a different amount of noise in each channel (the 2.4GHz band allows 3 non-overlapping channels where each channel is 20MHz wide) and each node wants to maximize its SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). I will term this as the greedy approach, which is already used in enterprise level devices. However, in an urban setting, nodes are close enough to each other for their signal to act as noise to other nodes. The greedy approach is no longer optimal as it bears a high price of anarchy. Instead, our goal is now to maximize the sum of channel capacities (under a power constraint). I will have to devise an algorithm to solve this problem and the algorithm does not seem trivial since the number of combinations is increasing exponentially with the number of nodes in the system. Even with only 10 nodes, we haveover 59000 possible allocations on 2.4GHz band and over 95 trillion on the 5GHz band.

Traditional networking literature tackles this optimization problem with Lagrange multipliers. An alternative is to look at approximate graph coloring schemes and compute chromatic numbers. I hope to experiment across various settings and approaches.
Over the course of the project, I hope to experiment with a real network which consists of at least 10 nodes and measure the improvements. One exciting thing about real life experiments is that nodewatcher was mostly used inside wlan slovenija’s network and I get to run it independently! This will probably allow me to fix some bugs on the way and contribute to nodewatcher in this aspect as well.

The algorithm will initally be developed as a nodewatcher module, but I hope to eventually port it to openwrt (possibly after the summer ends). The main difficulty is that nodewatcher can act as a central level planner, whereas the openwrt scenario requires negotiation among nodes. So it’s harder to convince a node to decrease its TX power to benefit other users. But imagine a network where nodes can communicate and achieve a socially optimal point of spectrum allocation! A glorious future awaits us.

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