Twister Internet Security

• Internet Security keeps you safe while you make the most of the Internet. Avast Internet Security. The real deal at spotting fakes. Download trial Buy now.
• Service Provider of ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE - Twister Antivirus 8 Lifetime, Internet Security, Antivirus Plus and Total Security offered by Faith Consultancy Services.

FAQ

Twister is the fully decentralized P2P microblogging platform leveraging from the free software implementations of Bitcoin and BitTorrent protocols.

Internet Security for PC - Secure your identity, finances and all of your online activities with one simple solution. There s no better way to stay protected from.

Now with 5 layers of protection. Introducing the new Norton Internet Security. Advanced internet and antivirus protection for anywhere you go and anything you do online.

What is twister.

twister is a microblogging peer-to-peer platform, that is, it is a distributed system like bittorrent or similar file sharing technologies. Being completely decentralized means that no one is able to shut it down, as there is no single point to attack. The system is also designed so it cannot be censored, freedom of speech cannot be taken from you. And because the cryptography is employed end-to-end, no entity is able to spy on your communications.

Is it open/free.

Yes. The protocol is open and community is invited to help to extend it with new features. The reference implementation is free software, based on Bitcoin and libtorrent sources, which are released under the terms of the MIT and BSD licenses, respectively.

How does it work.

For the complete description you should refer to the white paper. But in short: twister is comprised of three mostly independent overlay networks. The first provides distributed user registration and authentication and is based on the Bitcoin protocol. The second one is a Distributed Hash Table DHT overlay network providing key/value storage for user resources and tracker location for the third network. The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint swarms of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users.

Does it scale.

I hope so, but only time will tell. DHT network should distribute resources evenly to be stored by every node, including the posts themselves and profile information. Those resources are produced on a relatively slow volume, in average add the total number of posts produced every day and then divide by the number of users. Registration database is duplicated on every node, with about a hundred bytes or so per user.

The registration database may actually grow larger if we have a million of users, but still nothing comparable to the size of Bitcoin transation database. Some strategies are proposed to allow very low lightweight clients which wouldn t need to store the entire registration database.

What does it do. twister features

The first prototype or proof-of-concept implementation is meant to replicate the basic feature set of a microblogging platform. That means: finding users, browsing profiles, follow/unfollow, send text posts limited to 140 characters, retransmiting and replying posts, navigate through post threads, mentions, hashtags and direct private messages. Private messages requires the recipient to be follower of the sender, which is a common requirement in other platforms as well.

Some other features may be difficult to implement in a completely decentralized system and may require more thought. This includes arbitrary search of words in all posts and collecting the hashtags to find out the top trends.

How is Bitcoin used here.

Bitcoin, in the sense of the digital currency, is not used at all. However, the Bitcoin protocol and the implementation of the neat idea of block chain is on the basis of twister. The block chain provides a sort of distributed notary service, certifying who owns a given nickname. The name is associated with a specific key pair, which is used for authentication and cryptography.

Can I mine Bitcoins with twister.

Not exactly. The same mechanism used in Bitcoin for mining is also used in twister but for a different purpose, ensuring the order in which user registrations took place the nickname belongs to whoever registered it first. twister network must incentive users to mine, so block chain may keep advancing. However, unlike Bitcoin, there is no monetary value involved. The twister incentive is: whoever finds the hash collision to validate a new block of transactions will be awarded with the right to send a promoted message. Promoted messages have a certain probability of being displayed by twister client.

Promoted messages. Am I going to be flooded with SPAM.

No, I hope not. I don t like promoted message any more than you do, but I believe that a fair balance between the allowed volume of promoted messages will not upset the users while providing a good incentive for people to run the twister infrastructure.

Currently there is a maximum of one promoted message to be shown every 8 hours for every client, but the exact policy to be used is meant to be decided by the community.

The mechanism is actually quite democratic. Anyone can start generating blocks to send promoted messages, so this is effectively an advertising mechanism reaching the entire population of twister users. While an entrepreneur may invest in a mining rig to announce his product, a non-profit organization may ask his supporters to use their own personal computers to increase the probability of spreading their message.

How do you make money out of this.

I don t. But, on the other hand, my costs are pretty low except for my own time. Because the resources to store data are distributed among the clients I have only to pay to host this very simple web page here.

Why should I trust you.

You shouldn t. You may read the paper yourself to reach your own conclusions feedback is appreciated. You may download the source code, you may inspect it and then you can recompile it to create your own executable. You need to trust no one.

How secure is twister.

twister uses the same elliptic curve parameters of Bitcoin, namely secp256k1. This is not the curve that was supposedly compromised by NSA, which is called sec256r1. A non-compromised 256-bit ECC public key should provide comparable security to a 3072-bit RSA public key at least that is what we are told by the experts.

While I m not a cryptographer myself, I would reason that nothing would provide more incentive for people to try breaking some encryption than money. There are millions of USD laying on the table, encrypted with secp256k1 Bitcoin keys. I believe that if someone out there is able to break this technology, we would have already heard about it by now.

The direct message encryption implementation is based on a sample code which was posted on the internet by Ladar Levison of Lavabit. We all know that Ladar has shut his site down because he refused to cooperate with the US government allowing system-wide monitoring of his clients. We can only reason that if Lavabit encryption were fundamentally flawed the authorities probably wouldn t need to go through all of this hassle just to break into a single user s account.

Why peer-to-peer.

I believe that a microblogging platform based on peer-to-peer was the logical thing to do, an obvious solution urging to be created in order to address the concerns of free speech and privacy. The microblogging concept itself is such a basic communication tool that it makes no sense to handle this power to any single entity.

Is any peer notified when I get online.

The architecture is designed so that other users can t know if you are online or not, what your IP address is, or which users posts you might be reading. This information is recorded nowhere. That is not a hard guarantee though: what I m trying to say is that I personally have no means of doing it, nor any other normal user. However if one entity is capable of recording the entire internet traffic, he will probably be able to sort out exactly where you are connecting from your IP address. If this bothers you then you probably already know the solution: use Tor.

What is the problem with Twitter.

I like Twitter, I use it to read news and I have no complains or whatsoever. Twitter has a strong reputation of not being cooperative with PRISM wiretapping program of NSA, and of fighting to protect user s private data on courts. I believe Twitter deserves the public praise and recognition for this.

We don t know, however, for how long the company will be able to withstand such pressure. The so-called gag orders in US may prevent the recipient from ever saying anything about the request they receive, so if there is any piece missing in that relationship Twitter x government the truth is that we might never know.

So, without any specific complaint against Twitter, I d say it is conceptually unjustifiable why everybody must trust any single company to ensure that a given post really came from the user it claims. There is no reason to trust that this entity will never hand out your data, or that none of his employees would spy on you recently a Google employee was fired for spying on teen users. If there is a technical way to prevent this, why would we do it differently. Besides, I must admit that the technical challenge of implementing twister is a nice motivating factor by itself.

I have nothing to hide, why do I need privacy.

It is a common misconception that only wrongdoers need strong cryptography to protect their communications. Quoting a report published by the House of Lords, UK, 2009, Mass surveillance has the potential to erode privacy. As privacy is an essential pre-requisite to the exercise of individual freedom, its erosion weakens the constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in this country.

It is therefore a consensus that when a government has the ability to convey mass recording of everybody s communications, and exercises this ability without going through the due process of law, this opens possibility for a totalitarian state. Even citizens who are not wrongdoers may have personal things they feel embarrassed of, like, for example, their sexual option or the fact they may have gone through an alcoholism treatment. One in possession of such private information can use it against their opponents, including political adversaries, by harassing and blackmailing. This is a big strike against democracy.

Can t mass surveillance be stopped by law.

That s a debatable topic. It is important to realize, however, two fundamental differences of these new digital forms of surveillance:

Because of the technology, the costs for a government to record everybody s communication just got ridiculously low.

Code is law, professor Lawrence Lessig brilliantly realized. That means that it doesn t matter, for example, whether is it legal or not to have your Skype conversations wiretapped: if the code is changed to include an eavesdropping backdoor then it will be so. The law is not the determinant, the code is.

So just read the news and take your own conclusions about it.

I ve lost my private key, how do I get my nickname back.

Please. I would pay you to recover my key.

There is no way. You can t post messages, update your profile etc if you don t have your secret key. If I lost mine I would not be able to do anything either. The profile will be kind of locked forever and you will need to create a new one with a different name.

It is highly recommended that you do a copy of your secret key and keep it in a safe place. Because the secret key is just a string of 52 characters you can actually print it, take a picture of the screen or even write it down to a piece of paper. Sending the secret key by email would not be a wise idea though

What s the difference between the DHT network and the torrent/swarm.

DHT is primarily used to securely store resources like avatar and profile. The fact that posts are also replicated there is just a convenience so you don t need to subscribe to one s torrent/swarm just to see his last posts. Of course, the multi-valued DHT resources also provide a handy, scalable and low-overhead mechanism to implement mentions, hashtags and stuff.

Multi-valued DHT resources have no guarantees though and they are not automatically refreshed by nodes. As the network grew from 3 to 150 nodes in the first days of 2014, some of my first multi-valued resources became inaccessible since the nodes storing them are no longer neighbors of the original DHT target ID. Refreshed keys like profiles and avatars have no such problem.

Anyway DHT is NOT the intended mechanism for updating your timeline. That would be a really bad idea polling everybody s DHT last posts every few seconds.. It doesn t scale.

Swarm is used for posts only. Both public and private Direct Messages.

Is the block chain used to distribute user s messages.

Of course not. That would have obvious scalability implications.

What about twister for Windows. Mac. iPhone.

The current twister s proof-of-concept implementation was entirely developed in Linux and I have successfully ported it to Android. Because the UI is just HTML5/Javascript, porting it to other platforms is only a matter of recompiling the daemon. Windows, Mac and iPhone are certainly possible but I have no resources myself to do it.

Another more interesting long-term goal though is to move all cryptography code into browser s Javascript UI. This way users would be able to access twister from any client platform they use, choosing any third party server they want, while still keeping their private keys safe.

Update: twister now compiles in OSX Mavericks. Check doc/build-osx.md for instructions.