Android Port

It is time for GNUnet to run properly on Android. Note that GNUnet is written in C, and this is not about rewriting GNUnet in Java, but about getting the C code to run on Android.
Mentor: Hartmut Goebel

Help with Continuous Integration setup

There is a push for migrating our CI to Gitlab. The CI should eventually not just run "make check" on various platforms, but also perform tests with multiple peers running in different VMs with specific network topologies (i.e. NAT) between them being simulated. The CI should also be integrated with Gauger for performance regression analysis. Running jobs only when dependencies have changed and scripting more granular triggers or ideally automatic dependency discovery (as done by the autotools) is also important.
Mentor: TBD

Migrate gnunet-qr from Python 2.7 to C using libzbar

Python 2.7 is reaching its end-of-life, and we want to get rid of the dependency on Python. The existing gnunet-qr tool is a rather simple wrapper around python-zbar, which itself wraps libzbar. The goal of this project is to directly use libzbar to scan QR codes for GNUnet / the GNU Name System (see also #5562).
Mentor: Christian Grothoff

re:claimID OpenID Connect performance improvements

reclaimID is a decentralized identity system build on top of the GNU Name System. Upon authorization, the user provides a requesting party (RP) such as a website with an authorization ticket (e.g. piggybacked in an OpenID authorization code). The RP uses information contained in this ticket to

1. Retrieve the decryption key from GNS
2. Retrieve the user attributes from GNS

The GNS lookups ensure that the RP receives up-to-date attributes and functional decryption keys. However, in particular the RP-specific encryption key resolution can be slow and even fail depending on the network topology. We propose that in an initial exchange, in particular OpenID authorization code flows, we try to incorporate key and maybe even an attribute set in the ticket exchange. In order to mitigate this issue, this project is meant to investigate and implement how...

1. ... decryption keys can be added to an initial exchange in OpenID.
2. ... initial set(s) of attributes can be piggybacked in OpenID.

Mentor: Martin Schanzenbach

re:claimID alternative GNS-based encryption

re:claimID is a decentralized identity system build on top of the GNU Name System. The initial design and implementation of re:claimID includes an attribute-based encryption module in order to prevent unauthorized access to attributes in the name system. Our motivation for re:claimID was for it to be name system agnostic, which means the design theoretically also works for other name systems such as namecoin. Other name systems often do not have built-in mechanisms in order to do this. Hence, we implemented an ABE access control layer. Our ABE implementation requires two third party libraries: libpbc and libgabe. While we could merge libgabe into the gnunet service implementation of re:claimID, libpbc is a rather large, third party library which lacks packaging in distributions and for platforms. On the other hand, GNS supports record data encryption using symmetric keys as labels. If we make the access control layer of re:claimID more generic in order to support both ABE and GNS encryption, we could reduce the required depenencies. This would result in gnunet packages to include re:claimID by default. In short, the goals are to...

1. ... improve performance by reducing encryption overhead.
2. ... reduce dependencies.

Mentor: Martin Schanzenbach

Enable all networking applications to run over GNUnet out of the box

One great problem of the current Internet is the lack of disintermediation. When people want to talk they need a chat service. When they want to share files they need a file transfer service. Although GNUnet already possesses quite advanced integration into Linux networking, a little extra work is needed for existing applications like irc, www, ftp, rsh, nntpd to run over it in a peer-to-peer way, simply by using a GNS hostname like friend.gnu. Once people have added a person to their GNS they can immediately message, exchange files and suchlike directly, with nothing but the GNUnet in the middle, using applications that have been distributed with unix systems ever since the 1980's. We can produce an OS distribution where these things work out of the box with the nicknames of people instead of cloud services. For more information and context, read bug id 4625.

Mentors: lynX & dvn