Server Development
Phone App

Disrupt the District Hackathon - Communication Regardless

Communication Regardless is an framework/app intended to bypass the internet to provide secure information to people in countries where the government censors news/does not have the infrastructure to sustain internet. The way this works is using SMS to send the data over text to and from a phone endpoint and a server. This way information can be sent securely completely free of the internet!

Time spent: 24 hours spent in total

User Stories

The following required functionality is complete:

[x]SMS handled like HTTP requests
[x]Two sided encryption on the server side and the client side.
[x]Framework implemented for custom news/providers and other resources
[x]Data Storage for listening to RSS feeds
[x]Full encryption and decryption tested and working!
[x]Android app is mostly implemented

The following features were not able to be implemented due to lack of time and unexpected bugs

Fully hosted service in Amazon Web Services(Ran into problems with Servlets and Tomcat)
Fully implemented controllers due to the problem mentioned prior

GIF created with LiceCap.

Notes

Difficulties we ran into

Gradle and Maven mixed builds, bad documentation for message inbox cursor, building a protocol from scratch.

License

MIT LICENCE

Built With

android
java
jedis
mysql
redis
rest
servlets
shell
sql
twilio

Submitted to

Disrupt the District

Created by

I designed the overall architecture of this server, aiming for a distributed platform design. From there I split the server apart into 4 different pieces to make it more efficient to run at high capacity. From there I implemented this framework in a way that left plenty of room for the consumer of the framework to implement pieces as they see fit. After completing the framework. I implemented a small example of what the framework is capable of. The example version uses MySQL, Redis for data storage and buffering. It also uses RSS as a news feed. I almost got the project deployed on amazon, but I ran into some major difficulties with Tomcat8. Overall it was a very thorough, mostly working implementation of a SMS Data Transfer Protocol!

Eric Solender
Computer Science major at UMBC
I had a lot of fun on this project. Initially I worked mostly on implementing the core library, which was responsible for the communication between the sever and the android phone. After overcoming a few weird cross platform inconsistencies, I was able to get reliable cross platform encryption over SMS! I also worked significantly with Brian on developing the Android app. We worked together to make a pretty decent looking UI that was functional, but untested.

Nikita Wootten
I worked on the Andriod UI development. I created wireframes of the views to provide a guide for my teammate to implement those designs. This was my first time working with Android Studio and I proactive sought after help from the available mentors to help expedite the implementation process.

Brian Hanson Jr.

Updates

Eric Solender started this project — Feb 12, 2017 09:43 AM EST

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