Awards

The selected projects within the November 2013 Call are:

• Koruza

  KORUZA is an innovative open-source open-hardware wireless communication system, employing a new low-cost approach to designing free-space optical network systems, enabling building-to-building connectivity with a highly collimated light beam at a capacity of 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) at distances up to 100 m. It is designed to be suitable for home as well as professional users, enabling organic bottom-up growth of networks by eliminating the need for wired fiber connections and associated high installation costs. The simplicity of use, low-cost and compact size allow the system to be deployed in any network.

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• SecuShare

  The SecuShare project implement of a social messaging service based the GNUnet peer-to-peer framework offering scalability, extensibility, and end-to-end encrypted communication. The scalability property is achieved through multicast message delivery, while extensibility is made possible by using PSYC (Protocol for SYnchronous Communication), which provides an extensible RPC (Remote Procedure Call) syntax that can evolve over time without having to upgrade the software on all nodes in the network. Another key feature provided by the PSYC layer are stateful multicast channels, which are used to store e.g. user profiles. End-to-end encrypted communication is provided by the mesh service of GNUnet, upon which the multicast channels are built. Pseudonymous users and social places in the system have cryptographical identities — identified by their public key — these are mapped to human memorable names using GNS (GNU Name System), where each pseudonym has a zone pointing to its places.

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• PSYC2

  Protocol for SYnchronous Conferencing is an efficient text-based protocol for delivery of data to a flexible amount of recipients or people, by unicast or multicast. PSYC2 represents a next iteration of the PSYC framework in conjunction with SecuShare, another NLnet supported project that aims to build a novel social messaging system as part of the GNUnet peer-to-peer system.

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• nftables

  nftables is the intended successor of the popular iptables, providing a new modular packet filtering framework e.g. for operating systems based on the popular Linux kernel. Besides a modular code base that is better suited for modern multiprotocol networking environments, the nftables project aims to introduce powerful new userspace tools which will allow users to dynamically perform packet filtering on custom protocols (including but not limited to new proposed internet standards as defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force). Existing packet filtering solutions would require a recompiled kernel module in the same situation. The end result is that users will have more autonomy on what gets filtered and how, which make them less dependent on the technical choices of vendors and communities. The nftables project has been accepted in Linux mainstream kernel.

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• FTEproxy

  Network communications are increasingly becoming the target of surveillance and censorship. One natural defense is to use traditional cryptographic protocols — traditional encryption incurs low-overhead and does a good job of providing privacy. However, because encryption is so effective, many governments (e.g., Iran, Pakistan, and China) are willing to block state-of-the-art cryptographic protocols such as TLS and SSH. FTEproxy provides transport-layer protection to resist keyword filtering, censorship and discriminatory routing policies. Its job is to relay datastreams, such as web browsing traffic, by encoding streams as messages that match a user-specified regular expression.

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