kataomoi

A dating service for the paranoid

About

kataomoi is a system that allows users to discover mutual crushes; that is, if some user Alice inputs that she has a crush on Bob, and Bob inputs that he has a crush on Alice, they will each be notified of the other's interest.

The primary goal of kataomoi is to provide users with as much privacy as possible and require as little trust as possible. kataomoi implements secure two-party computation to ensure that users' data is never on the server in unencrypted form, and that Alice can learn whether Bob has a crush on her, if and only if she has a crush on him. The SENPAI protocol implemented by kataomoi provides cryptographic guarantees of privacy, and prevents cheating to the maximum extent possible; it is designed so that a malicious server can never learn users' responses, as long as the client code is correct.

Furthermore, kataomoi is constructed to allow users to verify that the correct protocol is being carried out, and that their data is secure. Because all communication with the central server takes place over WebSockets, the client portion of the kataomoi web app consists only of static HTML and JavaScript; thus, paranoid users can simply download the page source and load the web page locally, removing the need to trust any external server.

For more technical details, see the protocol.md file.

Components

kataomoi currently consists of a small server program written in Haskell, and a client written in HTML and JS. There are eventual plans to write a desktop client in Haskell, but currently the web app is the only client.

Installation

These instructions will set up a kataomoi server on Arch Linux (the procedure for other Linux distros should be similar), with NGINX serving the HTML/JS client and acting as a reverse proxy for the WebSocket server. All communication with the server will be secured using Let's Encrypt certificates.

First, we install NGINX, Haskell tools, and Let's Encrypt tools:

$ sudo pacman -S nginx-mainline ghc cabal certbot certbot-nginx

Next, all of the cabal packages we'll need for the server:

$ cabal update
$ cabal install text json containers websockets stm time network

Now, clone this repo, and tweak the client JS to connect to your server:

$ git clone https://github.com/ichung/kataomoi
$ vi kataomoi/client/client.js

Find the line near the top that says

    socket = new WebSocket("wss://kataomoi.mit.edu/ws/");

and replace kataomoi.mit.edu with your domain name.

Next, write a simple config file for NGINX:

$ sudo vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

All we need is the following:

user http;
worker_processes auto;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
    include mime.types;

    server {
        server_name kataomoi.mit.edu;

        location /ws/ {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9001;
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
        }

        location / {
            root /somewhere/kataomoi/client/;
        }

    }
}

As before, replace kataomoi.mit.edu with your domain name. Also, feel free to move the contents of kataomoi/client to some other location such as /srv/http/, and adjust the root line in your nginx.conf appropriately.

To get Let's Encrypt certificates and automatically configure your NGINX to use them, just run

$ certbot --nginx

When asked whether to require HTTPS, select the "Secure" option.

Once that's done, you're ready to start NGINX:

$ systemctl enable nginx.service
$ systemctl start nginx.service

Finally, start the kataomoi server:

$ cd kataomoi/server
$ cabal run kataomoi-server

Congratulations! Your server should now be up and running!