Nautilus

What is nautilus?

Nautilus is an open source, distributed web platform to enable protection and sharing of files, using peer-to-peer technologies. The top priority of this project is to save the user's files in a distributed and redundant way and doing so protecting his or her privacy. In addition, the program allows the user to donate part of the personal disk storage, which will be used by other users, in order to increase the limit of space usage allowed inside the network.

Features

• All the files you share or host inside the platform are split and then encrypted for increased security
• You can choose to host the files with a download limit and/or an expiration date
• You can also set a release date for a file, when the file will become available to other users
• After a file is uploaded to the program, the client generates a key file for retrieval purposes, the only way to have access to such file
• The possibility of sharing space from the user's personal computer to save files from other people is also offered, being rewarded with more space available to use inside the network. Because of the encryption used, no access is allowed to third-party splits or files hosted in this way.
• The program has been designed to avoid keeping any kind of data record about the users and their personal information, beyond the basic data needed to operate the system, thus looking for the creation of a zero-knowledge system.

Version

0.2 Alpha

Technologies

Nautilus uses a number of open source projects to work properly:

• Hibernate - Object-relational mapping framework for the Java language
• Spring - Application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform
• HSQLDB - Relational database management system written in Java
• BouncyCastle - Collection of APIs used in cryptography
• TomP2P - Distributed hash table which provides a decentralized key-value infrastructure

Installation

$ git clone [git-repo-url]
$ cd nautilus
$ mvn package -Dmaven.test.skip=true
$ cd target
$ mv nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar ~/nautilus

How to use it?

Server mode

With this mode you allow to other users save their encrypted fragments of file in your storage folder.

First of all, if you want to launch a peer in server mode you must enable the service and set the space that you want to "give away" (in KB) in the config.xml. This file is generated in the same folder where the executable file is.

<serverAvailable>true</serverAvailable>
<limitSpace>1048576</limitSpace> <!-- 1GB -->

If you don't want to establish any limit, you can set the value to "-1"

<limitSpace>-1</limitSpace> <!-- No limit space -->

You can also change your storage folder in the config file. By default this folder is created in your home folder. To change this, just write the path using the next tag.

<!-- For example -->
<StorageFolder>/media/user/2EFE01BBFE017BF9/nautilus_storage</StorageFolder>

Now you just run the service

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -s

Finally, to stop the service just press Ctrl+C

Client mode

Save file

On the other hand we have the client mode, which can be used to save files in our server preference, and to recover them afterwards using the generated keys.

Before save our files, or retrieval one of them, we need to install JCE (java cryptography extension) right there

In order to save our first file, we must define some server in the config file, like this:

<servers>
      <server>192.168.1.43</server>
</servers>

Once the server is set, we can then run the client to save the file. In this case we use the flag to signal that no limit on the downloads is to be used.

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck /home/user/Documents/file.pdf

If you want save your file with a limit, up to three downloads for example, you can use:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck file.pdf -dol 3

You can also establish one date to delete the file, once it is hosted in the network, using:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck file.pdf -dal 26/01/2016

On the other hand, if you want to establish a release date for the file, you need to use:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck file.pdf -dr 15/03/2016

Finally, for encrypt all the file keys with your public key, you need to use this flag:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck file.pdf -pkey

If you prefer to use another public key (For example: From another user) you must specify the key:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck file.pdf -pkey otherUserPKey.txt

All these commands are interchangeable, so you can combine the different flags when saving your files:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -ck file.pdf -dol 4 -dr 15/03/2016

Retrieval file

To retrieve the previously hosted file, we use the command "-cr" and the path to the generated file key:

$ java -jar nautilus-0.2-ALPHA-jar-with-dependencies.jar -cr file1_key.xml

This will recover the file in the same folder where the program is executed

TO-DOS

• Hold Punching: Connection between two or more LAN networks
• A noise system, in other words, a system that generates fake traffic to hide the real messages
• Graphic interface
• Client for Android smartphones
• Testing in Windows systems