Telepatia sintética interação humano-máquina em aplicações de messaging decentralizadas

• Autor(a) principal: Arteiro, Luís Sampaio da Nóvoa Barbosa
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/16974
• topic: Synthetic telepathy; Inclusion; Decentralization; Software engineering; Cryptography; Distributed hash table

Peer-to-peer communication has increasingly been gaining prevalence in people’s daily lives, with its widespread adoption being catalysed by technological advances. Although there have been strides for the inclusion of disabled individuals to ease communication between peers, people who suffer arm/hand impairments have little to no support in regular mainstream applications to efficiently communicate with other individuals. Additionally, as centralized systems have come into scrutiny regarding privacy and security, the development of alternative, decentralized solutions have increased, a movement pioneered by Bitcoin that culminated in the blockchain technology and its variants. Aiming towards expanding inclusivity in the messaging applications panorama, this project showcases an alternative on contactless human-computer interaction with support for disabled individuals with focus on the decentralized backend counterpart. Users of the application partake in a decentralized network based on a distributed hash table that is designed for secure communication (granted by a custom cryptographic messaging protocol) and exchange of data between peers. Such system is both resilient to tampering attacks and central points of failure (akin to blockchains), as well as having no long-term restrictions regarding scalability prospects, something that is a recurring issue in blockchain-based platforms. The conducted experiments showcase a level of performance similar to mainstream centralized approaches, outperforming blockchain-based decentralized applications on the delay between sending and receiving messages.