Motivation & Goal

We use video calls in our personal and professional lives through applications like Skype or Zoom. Service providers can often eavesdrop on the conversation. While video feeds can be protected with end-to-end encryption, service providers still learn a lot of metadata, such as who is calling whom. This may seem harmless in our daily lives, but in sensitive contexts, including medical consultation, whistleblowers contacting journalists, or activists communicating such metadata can become critical.

We are designing protocols that enable anonymous video calls where users can participate in group calls without service providers learning 1) if a user is in a call or 2) whom they are communicating with. Our goal is to build a usable proof of concept based on these protocols.

Beyond cryptographic expertise which we have, this project requires substantial engineering effort: building a distributed system with a heavy networking component, optimizing computation (possibly involving multi-threading, AVX instructions, or even GPU acceleration), performing measurements, and creating a usable UI. This project is implementation-heavy, may evolve over time, and will likely require learning new skills. Therefore, we are looking for someone who can work independently, is eager to learn, and enjoys developing complex and performant systems.

Requirements

• Familiar with Linux, networking and docker
• Experience in building distributed solutions
• Experience in high performance computing is beneficial
• Basic knowledge of cryptography is beneficial
• Knowledge of the English language goes without saying

Contact

If you are interested, please get in touch and send your application (including a letter of motivation, CV, and transcript of records) to:

• Dr. Kasra Edalatnejad (edalat@encrypto.cs.tu-darmstadt.de)
• Andreas Brüggemann M.Sc. (brueggemann@encrypto.cs.tu-darmstadt.de)