Attack-resilient media using phone-to-phone networking

Abstract

Modern media and news consumption is shifting from traditional outlets to online social media and mobile devices. However, the Internet has central components that are vulnerable to monitoring, censorship and Internet kill-switches. Human rights, like the protection of privacy, honor and reputation are endangered by this. Mobile devices with peer-to-peer communication technology can be used to build a server-less distributed system for information exchange and viral spreading. This thesis work contributes a self-organizing video-on-demand platform that is attack-resilient and can operate autonomously on a mobile device. For this, we make use of Tribler, which was only available for desktop platforms before. An open source prototype is built for Android OS, with a modular architecture specifically designed for portability and maintainability. Various measurements on different devices are conducted to quantify the performance and resource usage of the implementation. The results indicate our prototype can feasibly run Tribler on mobile devices. Therefore, millions of people that own a smartphone can now benefit from Tribler’s attack-resilient and privacy enhancing information exchange.