15 - Swarm One: Waggle demo by Racin W. Nygaard &Rodrigo Q. Saramago

and next up so a very interesting uh well all of the projects are interesting but this one uh goes into some specifics of swarm so vagal project will present an alternative to current ways of communication which aims to be much more secure and privacy preserving in many ways as well as more spam resistant so they are involved with swarm for a while now and are really knowledgeable so leveraging the cutting edge features the swarm has to offer in this respect so they will first have a presentation of their ideas and then a demo of the application they are working on so please play the first video thank you for the introduction and uh good afternoon everyone and welcome to this exclusive preview of vagal the vagal dance is the name of the communication protocol used between honeybees and we have adopted this name and are currently developing vaguely as a spam free privacy preserving secure communication protocol on swarm so just like the honeybees we envision that the b notes will dance when performing our protocol currently we are only two working on vagal and that's me casino and rodrigo salamago which will show you a demo afterwards we are both students at the university of stranger so before explaining vagal i will briefly talk about some of the problems that exist in existing email services so the first issue is spam and of course nobody likes spam yet it's proven to be a difficult problem to solve over time in traditionally traditional email services when a sender transmits a message it will eventually end up in the inbox of the recipient the the inbox is typically hosted by your email provider thus a spammer consumes thousands of gigabytes of storage on the inboxes across the world to come to combat this spam the email providers run advanced spam filters which require a lot of communication and needs to be constantly updated and fine-tuned as spammers are constantly evolving and finding ways past this filter another issue with traditional email services are limitations on privacy many email providers openly admits that the emails are not encrypted and that they have the power to read it often they will disguise this by saying that they only scanned for spam other services like protonmail encrypt the email but they still access some of the metadata when using the spam filter even though smtp is conceptually a decentralized protocol this only accounts for the outbox the inbox is centralized by protocols such as imap and pop3 which gives the email providers the power to deny any user access to their data so now you might ask what about vagal in vegal we have adopted an old idea called im2000 where the main idea is shifting the responsibility of storing emails from the receiver to the sender in swarm we implemented this by letting all messages remain in the sender's outbox feed until the recipient is ready to read the messages this in itself would drastically limit spam as now a spammer would essentially have to either pay someone to host these messages or he has to run a large server himself in vagal we however take this one step further by requiring that the recipient pre-approves any communication after accepting communication the recipient establishes a secure end-to-end encrypted communication channel with the sender we store all messages on the swarm network or however as they are encrypted no unauthorized party can read them so here's a big picture overview of the virgo protocol the for in the first contact we send a notification from alice to bob and if bob accepts both alice and bob will create an outbox a secure outbox that only the other party can access to transmit notifications we use the pss functionality of swarm these notifications contain the necessary information to start setting up secure communication they are encrypted using the public key of the recipient and encapsulated in a throttle chunk which is delivered by the swarm network to the recipient's b node by using trojan chunks we essentially forced the sender to spend some communication in mining the trunk and thus prevent any spam of notification upon decrypting a notification the recipient can choose to either agree or reject the communication entirely if you accept we establish a secure channel between the parties using the swarmfeeds functionality the security of the messages will then rely on the double ratchet algorithm so here's a more detailed communication flow or sequence flow of the notification protocol after uh alice alice retrieves bob's contact information from a public source such as key base or she can get it offline directly from bob she then notifies bob using pss and bob chooses what he wants to do with this notification if bob accepts he adds alice to his address book and then he agrees with alice to create an outbox feed in this outbox feed he acknowledges to alice that everything is set up on his side and when alice receives this notification she agrees with bob to set up her outbox after this they have essentially established a secure communication channel between them so when either of them now wants to send emails emails to each other they can simply write the content and then they encrypt it using the keys that they agreed upon previously and whenever bob is connected to the swarm network and he is ready to re read the messages from alice his verbal client will pull the field updates from alice's outbox and then he decrypts the content and then as alice will know that bob have received the email bob uh she she will delete it and bob must then choose if he wants to make a backup so he can either make a backup of on swarm or offline or you can of course choose to discard it entirely so i think that was enough talk and now i will send you to rodrigo which will show you a demo of our prototype uh right so to start to use logo uh the first thing is to log in and we use metamask so you need to log in your metamask account here and here i will again with two users so i will log in here uh with bob and this one here i will login with the other user that is alice right so alice does not have bob asset contact so she'd need to add his contact card to do that she goes to some social network or she should receive this contact card from bob or get it from any social network so here for example bob hosted his contact id on key base and alice can go there and download this information that would be necessary to establish the secure communication so let's download here the file and after download she goes to the contacts and click here to upload a contact based on the file this is the bob contact card information that is also here right so she can give a nickname for him for example like something like that and add his contact yeah so now uh alice can send a notification to bob to attempt to start the first contact with accept my contact place for example and then she sent a notification when she sent a notification the notification is mine and bob received based on the overlay address of his node so this would the chunk will be mine and eventually arrive here a notification for bob then bob can accept or deny this contact and he if he accepted this will automatically add alice in his contacts and will uh also send a notification back to to alice telling that uh bob accepted her and this information here is also based on the contact card of alice that they exchange using pxs and now bob and alice can secure exchange emails using the feeds to do that for example alice can just go here and compose and send a message like hello bob you um uh and then she can send a message uh here and this message will create the feed of which bob is listening to and then when the message arrives to the nodes bob can retrieve and read the alice's message and bob can do the same now because he will have the contacts and for example and then eventually the message arrived for alice uh sometime to get a bit unto the yes and so yeah so this is basically the demo uh [Music] if you want to know more about uh we will publish a demo publicly so you can interact with um with algo and use yourself and try yourself if you are interested more in the project so you can reach us on github or also by our currently mails or even using logo this is our contact card so you can send notifications and messages to us using this information yeah so thank you very much for listening any questions hi hello yes your challenge so hello um so i think this uh really shows great potential as a replacement for currently mainstream technologies and we're really really looking forward to seeing how this project evolves but i guess the whole communication stack so to say could be replaced but maybe so could you share your future plans uh and what is yet to come yes of course uh well actually we would like to establish wago as a library for secure messaging communication in peer-to-peer networks so this is our goal to make it as open source library and we want to improve the app to represent the same user experience that you can get from the mainstream emails and also allow people to install plugins and stuff to you know start to use wago without too much dependence of the running a node and eventually ease the migration to people from the mainstreams in asuwago so this is our goal yeah user experience is a big issue with with uh yeah current adapts so to say so looking forward to this thank you they're going racing thank you and