US102 - Community and outreach

[U039b]

Description: Given the success of events, webinars and demos with members of the civil society, NGOs and security researchers, we continue with our outreach plan. We organize trainings and demonstration sessions as well as creating spaces for the community to share feedback and request new features via our mailing list, GitHub issues or Discord server. We analyze one Android app that has received the community's interest (ex COP28 app) per month. The application to be analyzed is chosen by the community. The analysis report is first privately shared with the community and one month later it is publicly released.

We organize monthly calls open to all members of the community to share project updates and get the community’s feedback.

[CyrilBrulebois]

This month

We have identified various communication channels that we can leverage to enhance our outreach efforts.

Each month, we will analyze one Android app that has received the community's interest. We have set up all the tools we need to share the analysis report we will share with our community.

Each month, we will facilitate an online call open to the members of our community. We have set up all the tools we need to facilitate it.

Four work sessions were live-streamed through Twitch:

• Deploying PTS on a Raspberry Pi 4, and trying to virtualize it.
• Introducing pirogue-admin.
• Reworking PTS image generation, and adding initial support for Raspberry Pi 5.
• Solving intermittent network failures (dhcpcd), and improving Raspberry Pi 5 support.

Live at https://www.twitch.tv/CyrilBrulebois, every Friday at 12:00 UTC.

Next month

We will analyze the first Android app chosen by the community.

We will facilitate the first community monthly call.

Likely more live sessions around pirogue-admin (to support more than just Raspberry Pi devices), plus VPN/WireGuard at some point.

Challenges

None.

[CyrilBrulebois]

This month

As Khadija recently joined the team, a significant portion of the time was dedicated to help her get a better understanding of PTS intricacies, particularly focusing on Colander.

We initiated the planning process for a comprehensive strategic communication plan (thinking of a content calendar, new social media platforms and new outreach plan). This plan will guide our messaging and outreach efforts to ensure continuity of regular use of social media, given that there were no dedicated resources for communication.

As part of the communication activities, two work sessions were live-streamed through Twitch:

• Resuming automated Frida packaging
• More packaging: raspi-firmware, firmware-brcm80211, and Frida

Next month

We plan to finalize the strategic communication plan and begin its implementation. We will distribute the feedback form to current users and begin analyzing the responses. The insights gained will be used to refine our communication strategies and improve user engagement. This will inform future activities for finding new users and reaching out to new organizations to start using PTS.

Two major events for us will take place next month:

• We will be facilitating a workshop with the European DPAs. The goal it to explain the DPAs can use PiRogue to perform regulatory compliance audit of mobile applications.
• We will be attending the Global Gathering in Estoril. We booked a booth to demo the PiRogue Tool Suite project. Attendees will be able to test the PiRogue, ask questions about its usage and features, or get the network traffic of their mobile phone being analyzed.

More live sessions are expected, in particular around pirogue-admin, demonstrating and testing support for various use cases: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi 4, and Pi 5 as usual (ACCESS POINT mode), virtual machine with a single interface (VPN mode, using WireGuard), but also generic machines with several network interfaces, none of which is a wireless one (APPLIANCE mode).

Challenges

None.