Inspiration
The widespread use of the internet has connected people from around the world to a vast amounts of information and resources. However, in some countries, access to this information is restricted by censorship, blocking of websites, and laws that prohibit the use of encryption. This lack of access to information creates a significant challenge for individuals and organizations that rely on the free flow of information to carry out their work and maintain their privacy. Hence we were motivated to build Free Flow that facilitates this
What it does
The main idea behind it is that we need to communicate between parties secretly. We have a vendor website that acts as a middleman but we do not need to disclose the message to it. Hence the system enables communication / access to data to all users without anyone noticing it. Hence the people deprived of access of this data are basically sending requests to a general famous website and in turn they get the data to be transmitted available to them without anyone identifying.
How we built it
We had to make sure that any external party is not able to identify that some data / text is being transferred and hence we used steganography. This enables to encrypt the data in the already existing image and no one would know that data is being transferred. The person on the receiving end can decode the image by their private key. This is undertaken via a chrome extension that takes the input and then sends the message by hitting requests to the already existing subpages and hence the message is being transferred to the backend. It is encrypted and then via steganography, it is transferred. It is different from other chat systems that use steganography in the sense that we use a volunteer website who is a fully legitimate business entity (say a restaurant / bakery / etc). No images are uploaded by any user. Traffic resembles normal browsing activity on the volunteer website
Challenges we ran into
Understanding the whole process of building a chrome extension Sending message in a way that it is not identifiable Integrating steganography with the messages sent Decoding the message on the frontend with the user's private key
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Overcoming most of the challenges to build a prototype Learning the chrome extension and how is it developed was an awesome achievement Pressure situation working and delivering
What we learned
Team work Anything can be achieved if we have support We can learn and build new things out of our comfort zone within a given time frame
What's next for Free Flow
Build a fully functional MVP and deploy it to see and analyze the user traffic and how are user liking the achievement of getting access to all the communication.
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