25C3 was amazing! Thanks to everybody who presented and attended! Especially big thanks to the German Privacy Foundation and the i2p team.
Hello!
Exciting news: Tomorrow, we leave for the 25th Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Germany! We will have a table and hopefully be giving a lightning talk so come by and have a chat with us!
Also: After a brief period of flux.. Anomos is working again. We began to switch from our hacked-up public key system to a proper SSL/Certificate system a while back and got bogged down with school work so things were off track for a while, but now we’re free and have had some furious spurts of coding and now it works again with proper SSL! Comments on the last blog entry indicate that the GUI is broken again (bugger), but I can work on that, I doubt it will be anything too major so we can show off the fanciness for 25C3.
See you there!
Rolly out!
Or, so what’s been going on with Anomos development?
Well, we’ve switched out the old handshake protocol and replaced all the connections with TLS for speed and security purposes. It makes things a lot easier and faster for our project and should make things much easier for integrating with existing clients. This should speed up our release schedule, so you’ll see a proper release quite soon! However, if you’d like to experiment on your own before then, the source is available in the git as always.
Rich!
Hey all! Rich here.
I’m going to be going to the Free Culture 2008 conference in Berkeley, California this weekend and hopefully giving a quick talk about our project! If anybody is going to be there, you should stop by and meet me and we’ll hang out and have fun!
Just letting you all know, we are progressing along quite well. We have now done successful intercontinental test downloads from multiple anonymous sources! Anonarchy is nigh!
And our most exciting announcement is just around the corner!..
Richout
I just got relayers working! We can now successfully send an anonymized, encrypted download over any number of intermediate connections. The code’s still not quite ready for the alpha release (not that you can’t play with it if you want), but we’re getting very close.
Anyway, it’s 4 am. Sleep now, More updates later.
-John
So far all of the posts have shown scary command-line shots. Well, now I can show that Anomos does use the GUI properly as well!
Anomos, with GUI!
How about that!
The GUI can only run one instance at a time, hence the seeder still being command line, but that’s nothing to worry about right now. Soon we’ll have the resources for a dedicated test platform so we won’t have to fiddle around trying to get multiple clients and trackers all on the same box.
Rich
Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I’ll try to start provide regular updates about our progress from now on. We’ve finished implementing Neighbor initializations, and have gotten encrypted downloads to work between directly connected peers.
These downloads aren’t anonymous yet, but all the infrastructure for making them so is there. I expect to get relay nodes working sometime later this week, and after that Rich and I will likely be starting some small scale tests over the internet.
We’ve also added a bit of content to the wiki, like the protocol specification, but there’s still a lot to be done there.
As always, feel free to contact us if you’re interested in getting involved.
While at the HOPE conference last weekend, Rich and I were interviewed by IDG News service. The video has just surfaced on the Internet (Big welcome to everyone who found us through the various blogs that picked this up):
Those exciting command line shots in the video are indeed showing some working parts of the protocol, such as encrypted tracker requests:
We’re also getting very close to finishing neighbor-to-neighbor connections, so an alpha release can be expected within the next few weeks.
Me and John just got back from the Last HOPE conference in NYC. We got to talk to developers from both BitTorrent and Tor (thanks for the shirts and stickers!) who gave us tons of good input and ideas, some of which we’ve already integrated! Good times were had by all!
Thanks for everybody who came to see our demo on the 2nd floor. If you missed it, I’ve put up a copy of the pdf, which you can download: Anomos.pdf
John has been diligently hacking away at the codebase recently and it’s coming along really nicely. Clients can now securely connect to the tracker and handshake to securely connect with each other. Data encryption up and down is in place, and the Relayers are being worked on so it shouldn’t be long until a slightly hacky but working alpha is available.
I set up an Anomos Wiki which we will be using for documentation and guides at somepoint, but there isn’t any content there yet. I’m also thinking about setting up a phpBB forum or a Google Group so we can handle development discussions.
Rich out!
The previous tracking code model was a major headache. The codes were visible to all members of a circuit, they (potentially) leaked information about the topology of the network, and required that members of the circuit perform multiple decryption attempts for each packet they received. Luckily, there’s a nice alternative which has been staring us in the face the whole time. The tracker can wrap each part of the tracking code in layer after layer of public key encryption. In other words, after generating the tracking code “0:3:2″ the Tracker uses an encryption function E_peer(c), where c is the concatenation of the next tracking code digit and the encryption function corresponding to the next peer. If the tracking code “0:3:2″ is to pass a message m from peer “a” to peer “d” through the circuit “a -0-> b -3-> c -2-> d” then the expanded encryption function is:
E_a(0 . E_b(3 . E_c(2 . E_d(m))))
Each peer removes a layer of encryption and passes the message along. This is essentially the way in which Onion Routing networks, such as Tor, protect their routing information.