Decentralized Internet and Privacy
OpenPush
Introducing a Free, Decentralized Push Messaging Framework for Android
Push messages are an essential part of connected mobile devices. They are also one of the critical missing pieces in the open source Android ecosystem.
Until now, free Android apps would either need to implement their own push notification system, do without any push messaging or use the proprietary Google Cloud Messaging service.
In this talk I will introduce OpenPush, a free and open source, self-hosted and decentralized replacement for Google Cloud Messaging.
We expect both a long battery life and instant notifications from our mobile devices.
When implementing your own mobile push functionality you can usually optimize for either of these goals.
This is especially true if the user is running multiple applications which each come with their own persistent on-going connection for push notifications.
Wanting to combat the battery drain associated with maintaining multiple connections Google introduced the Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) framework which recently has become Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Firebase Cloud Messaging relies on the availability of the proprietary Google Play Services Framework on an Android device. Using FCM also requires the inclusion of the proprietary FCM client library into open source Android apps like Signal, Wire or even Firefox, which makes them effectively non-free software which cannot be distributed via the fully free F-Droid software repository.
Additionally all push notifications delivered via FCM need to pass through Google's servers leaving a metadata trace, even if it's an empty wakeup event or if the content of the message is encrypted.
Decentralized, self-hosted systems like Matrix, Nextcloud or RocketChat currently still have a dependency on Google's infrastructure and Terms of Service for delivering push Notifications.
In this talk I'll present a self-hosted, free alternative push messaging implementation which can either run alongside or as a replacement to FCM.
The talk will give a general architecture overview as well as walk through the design and implementation challenges of a push messaging service.
Further I'll present how OpenPush can be used by different projects and discuss some additional ideas on how the wider ecosystem could look like in the future.
Additional information
| Type | devroom |
|---|
More sessions
| 2/2/20 |
Today, hard disk encryption only protects user's data when their machine is shut down. "Close lid to encrypt" aims to enhance this protection also to suspend mode.
|
| 2/2/20 |
Almonit is a project for decentralized websites and web services. Decentralized websites and web services are an alternative to the way the web functions today. They combine decentralized storage (like IPFS), decentralized name services (like ENS) and P2P networks in order to replace the server-based model of the web. This lecture describes the Almonit project, its architecture, the technical details of the technology and the ecosphere in which it is created. Come discover the state-of-the-art ...
|
| 2/2/20 |
Society is becoming increasingly more aware of the importance of protecting digital information and it is becoming clear that the current centralized model has came to an end. The future of the Internet is distributed. Unsupervised, unmoderated access, affordable storage, data-replication, and security and privacy built-in are the most important aspects of the Internet of the future. Unfortunately, a global, reliable, decentralized network cannot be built without actual physical nodes, as the ...
|
| 2/2/20 |
Inspired by the concept of sharing data between apps on Android devices through Content Providers, this talk explains how this can be achieved on the Web today using decentralized identity and storage (identity hubs). This talk has been accepted late to replace "Decentralized object storage An open source decentralized object storage" by Ivan Fraixedes. Due to health issues Ivan's talk had to be cancelled. We wish him a speedy recovery.
|
| 2/2/20 |
Written in 2001, RFC 3170 states: "IP Multicast will play a prominent role on the Internet in the coming years. It is a requirement, not an option, if the Internet is going to scale. Multicast allows application developers to add more functionality without significantly impacting the network." Nearly two decades later, multicast is still largely ignored and misunderstood. This talk explains why multicast is the missing piece in the decentralization puzzle, how multicast can help the Internet ...
|
| 2/2/20 |
Please note this is a lightning-fast version of our full talk taking place on Saturday at 18:00 in the Main Track Do you know where your internet traffic flows? Does it go through China even if you don't want it to? SCION is a new internet architecture aimed at solving this problem. We will show how you can easily join the already existing worldwide network.
|
| 2/2/20 |
In 1996 Brian E. Carpenter of IAB and Fred Baker of IETF wrote a co-statement on cryptographic technology and the internet. This RFC wasn't a request for a technical standard, it was a statement on their concerns about Governments trying to restrict or interfere with cryptography. They felt that there was a need to offer "All Internet Users an adequate degree of privacy" Since that time successive governments around the world have sought to build back doors into encrypted apps and services to ...
|
