In July, we commence the “upribox – summer of code” to produce a stable version of the upribox software. Over the past few months, we worked on an initial prototype and also performed a user study at the FH St. Pölten usability lab. Now its time to take all this feedback and work on production-grade software of our project. In the course of the development of a first prototype, we also made a number of design decisions, the most relevant are the following:
OpenVPN instead of IPsec
IPSec produced a number of issues in our test environment, with e.g. a double-NAT setup and the user experience for getting IPsec running where painful. OpenVPN on the other hand performed very well, and is supported by most mobile operating systems.
Ninja-Mode (Tor) DISABLED BY DEFAULT
The Ninja-Mode (transparent Tor) will be disabled per default and we point users to install the Tor browser bundle. The rationale behind this decision, being that the Tor browser just provides the best privacy for users. In cases where the Tor browser bundle is not available (e.g. certain smartphone OSs), the ninja-mode will come handy.
Configuration Management
We currently working a porting our shell scripts ansible, in order to easily provide security and feature updates in the future.
In the next weeks we provide a number of alpha devices to a handful of people to test. If you are interested to test a upribox, get in touch. We will present the upribox at this year’s Chaos Communication Camp near Berlin in August 2015, and at the Europeans Researchers Night in September.