[Freedombox-discuss] Allied Efforts.

[The Doctor]

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On 10/19/2011 08:59 PM, Paul Gardner-Stephen wrote:

> As the founder of the Serval Project I can certainly confirm that 
> while telephony is our head-line use-use that we certainly care 
> about data, and are absolutely making data distribution tools that 
> operate on our mesh layer, so I think you will find that our goals 
> are even more compatible than it may first appear.

I concur.

> 1. strong cryptography that is not reliant on any global 
> certificate authority. A key part of this crypto layer is that we 
> are building a team that can perform a credible and open security 
> analysis of the architecture, which is a step often omitted.

Do you have notes or links to same that we could read, and that I
could pass along to our development team?  That is a problem that we
are working on right now.

> 2. The Rhizome Retriever that you have already discovered allows 
> the distribution of files, open-source maps (more on that in a 
> moment) and messages (including updates to the Serval software) 
> over the mesh. One of the interesting challenges we are addressing 
> with this is how to secure the update process to prevent unlawful 
> sabotaging of the Serval network through seizing or reverse 
> engineering the signing key. I am happy to explain more of our 
> thinking on this if there is interest.

Please do!  Byzantium was considering writing its own file
distribution utility, but if you already have such a thing in the
works we might like to make use of it.  This would also potentially
make for a very large mesh indeed, spanning any number of projects and
technologies at the same time.

> It should also be said that while we are targeting Android 
> initially, we are structuring the software so that it can run on 
> any operating system, and we have preliminary work underway for 
> porting to Linux, Symbian S60, iOS, and OSX.

What languages are you developing the software in (other than for
Android)?

> We are also actively engaging in the IEEE 802.11 standards process 
> to get ad-hoc fixed (ask me if you need information about the 
> problems with using ad-hoc WiFi to form mesh networks), and also
> to standardise

Could you describe what you have run into thus far?  So far, our
biggest problem has been with Intel's drivers picking their own cell
ID and not picking up the shared one at odd times.  This seems to be a
version-specific bug (followed by mistyping configuration settings on
some of the clients).

- -- 

The Doctor [412/724/301/703]

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"What bothers me is, nothin' does."

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