Why AleHu?

Why AleHu?

Back in 2012 I faced the following problem: I had taken pictures at my son's birthday party and I wanted to pass on the good shots to the participating kids' parents. The photos had a total size of about 45 MB so sending them via conventional e-mail providers such as GMX was impossible due to the usual mail size limits.

Uploading the pics to some public platform like DropBox, Minus.org and the like would have been an option, however I always felt somewhat uneasy handing over private data to those platforms because you never know what the companies behind these platforms are up to with your data.

So next I checked the WWW for (free) mail services allowing large scale attachments. I found several services that would have served my purpose. However, I would have had to register with those services and of course you face the same problem as with the beforementioned platforms (handing over data to someone who isn't intended to look at your data).

The way I solved my problem was announcing the availability of the pictures via e-mail and passing an USB stick to whoever wanted to have the photos. Well, problem solved, however it was a bit cumbersome and it was then when I first thought of something like AleHu, a mixture of e-mail and BitTorrent. And since at work we deal a lot with cryptography and digital signatures, consequently I felt that adding those components would make it special. The separate ingredients for AleHu weren't new at all and have been available for years or even decades, however their combination in the AleHu messaging system seemed to be a new idea.

My first attempts in creating AleHu came to a sudden end around February 2013: Instead of focusing on the "happy path" of successfully transmitting and receiving a message from a sender to a receiver I got stuck with all kinds of possibilities how transmissions could fail so I felt overwhelmed by the complexities of my project. Time was another problem and thus I stopped my efforts in persuing the project.

In mid 2013 Edward Snowden disclosed several top secret documents and revealed that privacy and the Internet were apparently an illusion. In August 2013 I had sucessfully finished a totally different private web project (an online football game) using CakePHP and therefore I felt pretty confident in reactivating my work on AleHu, especially the server part.

In fall 2013 I finally finished a prototype version of AleHu including a text based client and a primitive server: simple text messages could be encrypted, signed and transmitted to the server which validated the signature and passed the message on to the recipient that was able to decrypt the message. This was a very exciting moment: a proof of concept was accomplished! And it motivated me to go on with this project.

As months passed by, the text based version was turned into a GUI version and the server part was improved several times to increase its stability. In the meantime I had started to talk to several people about my project and most of them encouraged me to continue my efforts. In December 2013 a rather stable version called "Anton Zeilinger" was finished and at the end of January 2014 I decided to publish my project at sourceforge.net. Well, here we go ...