There is an application called Shadow Internet which can be especially useful in an emergency. But, let's look at a supposed scenario… ..
Imagine being a demonstrator living in a country where there is a coup in progress, police collide in the streets with protesters, and any government or coup d'état has closed or restricted its country's internet service providers as well as cellular antennas.
You are on the street, resisting the overthrow of your country's constitution, and from your cell phone you get to video footage of the conflicts and what is happening at any moment in your country. But how will you communicate and share the videos with the outside world?
The problem seems unsurpassed but there is a solution with it Shadow Internet which works as follows: Every mobile phone that has installed the shadow internet application becomes a node in an offline mesh network, a phone-to-phone network that exists outside the existing infrastructure. Any videos or images that protesters want to share with the outside world can be encrypted and sent to a peer-to-peer network consisting of mobile phones, until a phone with a direct internet connection is found.
But if the internet network is out modeς, πώς μπορεί ένας νέος χρήστης να λάβει την εφαρμογή Shadow Internet; Και πώς μπορεί να είναι βέβαιος ότι θα λειτουργήσει στο τηλέφωνό του; Όχι μόνο η εφαρμογή μπορεί να μοιράσει τον εαυτό της με τη χρήση Bluetooth από τηλέφωνο σε τηλέφωνο, αλλά μπορεί επίσης και να μεταλλαχθεί ώστε να εργάζεται σε κινητά τηλέφωνα με διαφορετικές εκδόσεις λογισμικού και υλικού.
But there is currently no comprehensive application that can do all that, but Paul Brusse and Johan Pouwelse, researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, are working on this idea.
The project shadow internet is currently fragmented. Investigators announced on Tuesday a document for their work so far.
So far, Brusse and Pouwelse have developed an Android application called Shadow Internet and can divide itself into other phones via Bluetooth and near-field communication (NFC).
The self-mutation of the application depending on the type of phone is located currently at GitHub σαν ένα ξεχωριστό κομeye της εφαρμογής. Μπορεί να self-compile και να μεταβάλλεται αναλόγως ώστε να συνεργαστεί με διαφορετικά τηλέφωνα.
Encryption will come from project Tribler, which is a peer-to-peer network built on BitTorrent like Tor onion routing.
In practice, overall the app could work something like this: someone gets a video of an important event, but doesn't have an internet connection to share the video with others online. So they disguise the video through Brusse and Pouwelse's app into something that looks less interesting, a calculator for example. The app then connects to other nearby phones and uses it service file sharing.
Instead of having to transfer video between users manually from phone to phone, the app handles all of this process until it reaches a phone connected to the internet. Beyond that, the video could be hung up everywhere.
Of course the idea of Brusse and Pouwelse for an application that can transmit offline information is not unprecedented. The FireChat, developed by Open Garden, was popular among protesters during the demonstrations in Hong Kong last year because it allowed them to communicate with each other via WiFi and Bluetooth signals. But the difference is that Brusse and Pouwelse are trying to eliminate the need to pre-install the application on its mobile.
At present, there are all the components of the Shadow Internet application. All that remains is to combine them all together in a way that is understandable to the average user. There is also the question of how to prevent someone from mutating the application into malicious software and actually turning a tool into an invincible spyware.
