Press Release: Nym puts up ‘AnonDrop’ bounty at Kyiv Tech Summit hackathon for people to securely…

---

As a sponsor of the Kyiv Tech Summit, Nym boosts efforts to democratise the documentation of human rights violations with a follow up grant via Shipyard

NEUCHÂTEL, SWITZERLAND, 12 SEPTEMBER 2022 — Nym, the leader in network layer privacy, in partnership with Filecoin and IPFS, both providing persistent decentralised file storage, is pleased to announce that the AnonDrop challenge bounty, worth $4,000, at the recent Kyiv Tech Summit hackathon, has been awarded to the Citizen5 project by Allister Beharry.

AnonDrop is an encrypted file drop application that allows users to securely upload data without compromising their identities. In the current climate in Ukraine, this would be particularly important for the purpose of securely documenting and sharing evidence of war crimes anonymously. One of the harder problems facing the documentation of war crimes is to allow witnesses to send in data without revealing who they are or their location to an adversary that can watch their internet connection.

The intention is for AnonDrop to become a tool that democratises the gathering of evidence that can be used to pursue human rights cases — by making the process simple and secure.

Nym General Counsel Ahmed Ghappour affirms: “More than ever, witnesses to human rights violations must come forward and without fear of retaliation. In Ukraine, where witnesses of war crimes are facing a technologically sophisticated adversary, network level anonymity is the only way to guarantee the safety and security needed to provide evidence to prosecute perpetrators.”

Ukraine is the third largest community operating and using Nym at present. Nym CSO Jaya Klara Brekke and COO Alexis Roussel travelled to Kyiv to show the Nym team’s support and to understand the actual threats faced by Ukrainians on the ground. They were joined by the Minister of Digital Transformation and Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov and Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum. Visiting the country is essential for understanding the requirements for AnonDrop to be usable for the Ukrainians.

The inspiration for AnonDrop is early cypherpunk work on distributed persistent data storage as well as the recent effectiveness of the open source intelligence community (OSINT) in mobilising broad, decentralised efforts towards intelligence gathering and verification during the Russian invasion. The use of OSINT has enabled intelligence gathering, debunking and fact-checking to happen in real time.

“With AnonDrop, Ukrainians and other witnesses will be afforded the protection they need to capture and upload subversive content. Coupled with a suite of image provenance and verification features, the uploaded media will satisfy evidentiary requirements for use in courts across the globe. Nym is committed to advancing AnonDrop as a matter of urgency as we understand the immediate need for it,” Ghappour adds.

Use of AnonDrop will extend beyond Ukraine, in cases where human rights work is needed and sender anonymity is paramount, allowing the persistent and decentralised storage of data. There has been a long-stream of work on using mixnets for this use-case, such as the FreeHaven design that preceded even Tor, but this privacy-preserving storage is now one step closer to becoming a reality.

Using Nym as a decentralised mixnet that provides privacy and anonymity at the network layer, AnonDrop will be able to withstand attacks by even nation-level adversaries. The Nym mixnet protects not only the content of messages but also, crucially, the metadata associated with them.

Further iterations are needed before the application should be used in life or death situations, in view of the gravity of the circumstances. To that end, Nym has qualified the winner of the AnonDrop bounty to automatically receive a follow-up grant from the upcoming Nym Shipyard grant program to continue development. Prioritised features include image provenance and authentication in order to make the evidence usable in court.

AnonDrop is the first application by Nym that directly addresses an immediate challenge in reporting war crimes. This is in line with Nym’s focus and vision of enabling everyone to communicate freely without censorship or fear, protecting people from the consequences of surveillance, one of which is human rights violations. More applications using the Nym mixnet are expected to be built over the upcoming year through integrations and the Nym Shipyard grant program.

-END-

About Nym:

Nym is an open-source, incentivized, and decentralised platform that protects privacy at the network level of any application, wallet or digital service. Nym protects against traffic pattern analysis and metadata surveillance. More: https://nymtech.net/

Media contact: Candice Teo, candice@nymtech.net

Privacy loves company

Discord // Telegram // Element // Twitter

The internet is global and so is Nym: join the Nym Community wherever you are and help build the private internet today.

English // 中文 // Русский // Türkçe // Tiếng Việt // 日本 // Française // Español // Português // 한국인