I-Corps: Blocking-, Censorship-, Surveillance-, and Disaster-Resistant Communication for Normal Smartphone Users

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Free speech eases access to information necessary for rational individual and collective decision making. Currently, communication technologies are susceptible to blocking, censorship, or surveillance because no easy to-use technologies that run on commodity hardware exist. Direct and transitive smartphone-to-smartphone communication technologies, however, have the potential to make it easier for normal people to efficiently communicate without being subject to blocking, censorship, or surveillance. The proposed work will support freedom of speech by enabling censorship-resistant communication among normal people. The proposed work also has humanitarian application such as enabling continued communication when man-made or natural disasters have partially or fully disabled infrastructure-based communication systems. It also has the potential to benefit communities and families by enabling reliable, private communication. Wider access to information and reduced propaganda increases the likelihood of correct economic and personal decisions. The key is breaking dependence on easily subverted Internet infrastructure. Individual smartphones automatically link up into a local wireless network without dependence on cellular base stations or wireless access points, so messages hop across towns through a community of smartphone users. Recently the team has developed power models that can relate communication protocol design decisions to smartphone battery life, yet again improving efficiency. Specifically, the team has developed technologies that can enable direct phone-to-phone communication among Android-platform smartphones without changes to hardware or operating system, can now gather data on time-varying communication network topologies for smartphone-based infrastructureless networks, and can automatically identify spam sources in authority-less networks based on the message retransmission decisions made by other network participants