Hi everyone!

I am Felipe, one of the students accepted into GSoC this year. I am a Computer Engineering student at the Federal Technological University of Parana (UTFPR) in Brazil, studying Anonymous Communication on a research project lead by David R. Andersen [0], who is also my advisor. Since I joined the project three years ago, we have mostly worked on pyaxo [1], nymserv [2], nymphemeral [3], and recently, unMessage [4] - check them out!

unMessage is a peer-to-peer instant messenger that provides privacy and anonymity to its users. In order to achieve that, it uses the Double Ratchet Algorithm [5] for encryption, Onion Services [6] for transport metadata minimization and its own protocol for application metadata minimization.

unMessage is still in alpha stage, there are many things to explore, research and develop, and improving it is the GSoC project I am going to work on while mentored by dawuud [7] and meejah [8]. Specifically, we are going to:

- Improve its setup script [9] - Use attrs [10] - Support file transfer [11] - Add a logger [12] - Make functions/methods asynchronous [13] - Add a test suite [14]

Depending on the development of each task, it is possible that there will be more time available to:

- Use automat [15] - Support offline messages [16]

Although we selected a couple of user features, most of the tasks are architecture centered to increase its quality and maintainability. unMessage has potential to become a great app the community can benefit from, providing useful features and a good user experience for private and anonymous communication - this project is a big step in this direction. More information can be found in the GSoC proposal [17], documentation [18], GitHub page [4] and issues tracker [19]. Feel free to contact me as well:

OFTC: dau Email: dau@riseup.net PGP: 0xC5A49047572A0D47

Having this opportunity means a lot to me. I am looking forward to start working with the Tor community and continue to do so after the summer. Thank you very much!

I would like to thank David R. Andersen, who has been my advisor since we started working together, developed unMessage with me and has always been supportive. I also would like to thank Patrick Schleizer, HulaHoop and meejah for the support and contributions since the first unMessage release. This project has only made possible because of you!

Thanks, -Felipe

[0]: https://github.com/rxcomm [1]: https://github.com/rxcomm/pyaxo [2]: https://github.com/rxcomm/nymserv [3]: https://github.com/felipedau/nymphemeral [4]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage [5]: https://whispersystems.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet [6]: https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html [7]: https://github.com/david415 [8]: https://github.com/meejah [9]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/35 [10]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/34 [11]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/12 [12]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/30 [13]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/21 [14]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/33 [15]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/36 [16]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues/32 [17]: https://gist.github.com/felipedau/8b48c6fde875e673f62d7569a27f254a [18]: https://unmessage.readthedocs.io [19]: https://github.com/AnemoneLabs/unmessage/issues