Master/Diploma Thesis over

[Michael Prinzinger]

My Dear Phantoms,

My thesis has come to an end.
I handed it in last week and with that graduated from university.
I have not updated this Blog while I was working on the thesis, but

now that I finished, I will summarize what I did.

Most of you will have read the white paper, the slides or will have

watched Magnus at Defcon. So you probably remember that the protocol

can be roughly split into three parts:

1: routing paths
2: routing tunnels
3: the Phantom Network Database

In my thesis I focused on routing paths.
At first I laid some ground work by creating an environment for
Phantom to use. This includes for example functionality to parse a
config file and writing to log files. Noteworthy is also the unit test
suite that I have developed in parallel to the protocol code. It
covers most functionality used to construct routing paths.
After that I implemented the key components needed for constructing
routing paths:

Cryptography: For encryption I used the OpenSSL library. For
asymmetric encryption I have implemented an interface for using RSA,
and for symmetric encryption an interface for AES.
Furthermore I made simple interfaces to use the OpenSSL SHA256 Hash
functions.

Sockets: I first started with the standard Berkeley Socket API and a
functional adapted interface is included in the project. However since

the Phantom Protocol makes use of SSL streams I later saw it more useful

to directly use the OpenSSL Socket API. Thus a class for sockets with
derived classes server and client were written, which, on top of socket
functionality, implement all necessary SSL functionality, like the
verification of SSL certificates.

Serialization: The core medium for information transfer in the
routing-path construction phase are Setup Packages. I created them as
serializable class using the GoogleProtoBuffers library. With that byte
order problems can be outsourced to a well tested library.

Finally I wrote a prototype which is able to create a routing path of
arbitrary length (except zero-length) given a list of potential nodes
(IP, Certificate, Public Key). The prototype fully implements Magnus'
design with some small exceptions. The prototype consists out of two
binaries:

- anonymized_node: simulating the behaviour of an anonymized computer
trying to establish a routing path and

- routing_node: a Phantom routing node waiting for arbitrary requests
and joining a routing path upon receiving such a request


FUTURE

As soon as I will have received my final grading on the thesis, I will
publish it under some creative commons license and share a link on this list.
For the future of the code I have some good news for you: Another
student at my university and a good friend of mine at that, has taken
over the development of the Phantom protocol as his own Master/Diploma
Thesis. This means another talented programmer will be able to work full
time on the implementation of other aspects of Phantom, which is great!
I presume he will soon make a public appearance himself and announce
his targets of development here.

I myself will also stay at the project and support it henceforth. We
are also thinking of presenting our progress on one of the upcoming
conferences. If so, we will inform you about that here.

Till then, stay tuned - generic, decentralized, unstoppable, unbreakable

anonymity will come to you. :-)

Michael

[Magnus Bråding]

We are of course all very grateful to Michael and the excellent work he
has done on the implementation included in his thesis project!

We are looking forward to his continued stay within the Phantom project,
and we are also very happy about the friend of his that he brought into
the project to pick up where he left off (for this time)! As Michael
said, more about that soon!

Thanks for this time Michael!

Regards,
Magnus Br�ding

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