Adesh Attavar | WebSocket Based Ockam Transport In TypeScript

[ade5h]

Hi, I'm Adesh Attavar, a senior undegrad from Manipal Institute of Technology. Security, cryptography, encryption, and computer networks have always sparked my attention, and I've worked on a few projects in these areas. When I first learned about Ockam, I was taken aback by the existing state of affairs, in which developers rely on machine defences and apps within the machine to ensure security as their data travels over complex, multi-hop, multi-protocol routes. I really liked how Ockam was trying to solve this problem by providing developers with easy to use libraries to implement end to end encryption and security.

Over the past few days I’ve been going over the Ockam codebase, trying to learn how to implement a secure channel myself and also trying to teach myself a bit of Rust which looked a bit similar to Swift at first. The documentation was really elaborate and helped me understand the concept of node, worker, routing, transport and helped me easily build a secure channel which I have documented over here. In the process of going over the documentation, I also made a small Pull Request to the repository which even got merged.

From my understanding of the project description, I’m supposed to implement TypeScript version of WebSocket based Ockam transport over the course of this externship. That is, create something similar to this in Typescript implementation section. I have gone through the Rust implementation of WebSocket based Ockam transport, and I’m quite confident that I will be able to create its Typescript implementation.

Here are some of the work that I’ve done in the past which would be relevant to what I would be working on in this externship:

• Secure Doc: It is a collaborative documenting platform which offers end to end encryption. Collaborative documenting platform like Google Docs encrypt the data with their own key and hence are able to look at the data stored in their system which therefore does not guarantee end to end encryption. Secure Doc on the other hand asks User for a password and then encrypts the data with the help of this password using AES encryption, and the same password is then used to decrypt the data. This way password never leaves the User’s browser and a secure transfer is guaranteed. In this project, Socket.io was used to establish web socket connection as the Users collaborate on a document and Express.js was used to create the server.
• Camera capture Synchronization on a network of smartphones: In my Samsung research internship, we developed an Andriod application to synchronize camera capture on a network of about 90 heterogeneous smartphones and achieved a synchronizing error of less than 10ms. Before synchronizing the clocks on all the devices, we had to bring all the devices onto the same network. For this we used Wifi Direct and also had to create a concurrent TCP server to communicate between the Group Owner and Peers.
• File Compression: In this application I’ve implemented Huffman Compression algorithm to compress and decompress a text file which achieves a compression ratio of around 1.7.

More discussion and suggestions are always welcome. I'm very excited to learn and contribute to this Organization.