Hi all, and Happy New Year! The first month of 2018 is moving so quickly we almost forgot there was a Christmas season :)

In a few weeks we plan to have a closed pre-alpha for testing purposes. It will be a location shifting VPN service (without payments), accessible to the most active community members who have agreed to test it and share their feedback. With the pre-alpha we are aiming to collect network usage statistics, that would help us outline targets for future development.

After the initial testing we’ll invite more people to use this version — check our Medium updates and Twitter. Once the pre-alpha is tested, we’ll announce approximate times of other releases.

Development

During the last couple of weeks we have started working on two big features of the network: securing 1–1 communication channel messages by signing/verifying with private identity key, and Client’s API.

We added an API to our Client app with the essential methods (create identity, connect, get status, disconnect, find proposals). This creates a possibility for us and other dev teams to build user interface apps or automate the client.

We designed a framework for signing and verifying communication channel messages between Node, Client and Discovery. This part of the system is very important for identification of the both communicating parties. The feature will prevent faking identities on the network as well as taking over the communication channel between two parties. Our next step is to implement the proof of concept and test all the parts together.

Secure authorisation mechanism was also implemented in Discovery API and Identity API.

Ubuntu Docker containers were created to run all needed network components. This will save us development time and make deployment to miner machines easier.

We did a security audit for our VPN config, encryption algorithm and TLS authorisation flow.

For more details, please check our activity on Github.

Team

The newest addition to our team is Andrius Zygmanta, who just joined us as the Product Manager. Together with Ramunas he will ensure the product quality and delivery, while expanding and curating the open source community willing to contribute to the project. Andrius has 7+ years of international experience in IT and Marketing projects, programs, products and services management. His last workplace is an online retailer La Moda, where he was responsible for overall delivery & results of all IT projects and programs in Vilnius development centre. He has proven background in building, coaching and leading strong teams from different industries, and we’re happy to have him in ours!

We are also looking for two Community Managers to join us remotely. If you know someone great for the job, shoot an email to marta[at]mysterium.network.

They say our updates could do with some visual material :)

That’s it for now, more news in two weeks!

Visit our website — https://mysterium.network

Follow us on Twitter — https://twitter.com/MysteriumNet