[tor-project] GSoC 2017 - Introduction: unMessage

[Felipe Dau]

Hi everyone!

I am Felipe, one of the students accepted into GSoC this year. I am a
Computer Engineering student at the Federal Technological University
of Parana (UTFPR) in Brazil, studying Anonymous Communication on a
research project lead by David R. Andersen [0], who is also my
advisor. Since I joined the project three years ago, we have mostly
worked on pyaxo [1], nymserv [2], nymphemeral [3], and recently,
unMessage [4] - check them out!

unMessage is a peer-to-peer instant messenger that provides privacy
and anonymity to its users. In order to achieve that, it uses the
Double Ratchet Algorithm [5] for encryption, Onion Services [6] for
transport metadata minimization and its own protocol for application
metadata minimization.

unMessage is still in alpha stage, there are many things to explore,
research and develop, and improving it is the GSoC project I am going
to work on while mentored by dawuud [7] and meejah [8]. Specifically,
we are going to:

- Improve its setup script [9]
- Use attrs [10]
- Support file transfer [11]
- Add a logger [12]
- Make functions/methods asynchronous [13]
- Add a test suite [14]

Depending on the development of each task, it is possible that there
will be more time available to:

- Use automat [15]
- Support offline messages [16]

Although we selected a couple of user features, most of the tasks are
architecture centered to increase its quality and maintainability.
unMessage has potential to become a great app the community can
benefit from, providing useful features and a good user experience for
private and anonymous communication - this project is a big step in
this direction. More information can be found in the GSoC
proposal [17], documentation [18], GitHub page [4] and issues
tracker [19]. Feel free to contact me as well:

    OFTC: dau
    Email: dau at riseup.net
    PGP: 0xC5A49047572A0D47

Having this opportunity means a lot to me. I am looking forward to
start working with the Tor community and continue to do so after the
summer. Thank you very much!

I would like to thank David R. Andersen, who has been my advisor since
we started working together, developed unMessage with me and has
always been supportive. I also would like to thank Patrick Schleizer,
HulaHoop and meejah for the support and contributions since the first
unMessage release. This project has only made possible because of you!

Thanks,
-Felipe

[0]: https://github.com/rxcomm
[1]: https://github.com/rxcomm/pyaxo
[2]: https://github.com/rxcomm/nymserv
[3]: https://github.com/felipedau/nymphemeral
[4]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage
[5]: https://whispersystems.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet
[6]: https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html
[7]: https://github.com/david415
[8]: https://github.com/meejah
[9]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/35
[10]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/34
[11]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/12
[12]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/30
[13]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/21
[14]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/33
[15]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/36
[16]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/32
[17]: https://gist.github.com/felipedau/8b48c6fde875e673f62d7569a27f254a
[18]: https://unmessage.readthedocs.io
[19]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues