Blackouts

Blackouts occur frequently around the world, usually due to oppressive regimes that cause these blackouts in an effort to control their population. Communication is a basic human right (UDHR, Article 19), and thus we need to work on tools that would help people in affected regions.

Moby

Moby solves this using a bi-modal design, using the Internet to establish trust among users and prepare them for blackouts.

Bi-modal design

During blackouts, users can rely on the Moby Ad-Hoc network to communicate with each other. Further details on how these modes work can be found in our paper.

Paper

For more details please read our PETS 2022 paper.

Moby: A Blackout-resistant Anonymity Network for Mobile Devices PETS 2022

Amogh Pradeep (Northeastern University), Hira Javaid (Northeastern University), Ryan Williams (Northeastern University), Antoine Rault (EPFL), David Choffnes (Northeastern University), Stevens Le Blond (EPFL), and Bryan Ford (EPFL)

Press

Interview with Kee Jefferys from Oxen

PETS 2022 presentation video link available soon

Moby Client

The Moby Client is implemented as an Android app. It is based on the Signal application and extends it to enable P2P communication using Wi-Fi direct and Bluetooth.

Client code can be found on GitHub.

Moby Simulator

We run Moby simulations on call data records (CDR). The CDR data is as follows.

  • Towers with associated locations
  • User call data
    • Tower where this was made/received
    • Hour when this was performed
  • User SMS data
    • Tower where this was sent/received
    • Hour when this was performed

Using this, we simulate Moby and multiple attacks on its Ad-Hoc network. The code used to process and work on CDR data can be found on GitHub.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grants: SaTC-1618955 and ProperData SaTC-1955227).