vRFC1149
========
This is an implementation of "IP over Avian Carrier", using tweets as
virtualized avian carrier.
Installation and requirements
=============================
You need
* tweepy >= 1.8 (https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy.git)
* python-bytearray
Each client needs a twitter account to tweet network packets and one
account to follow for incoming network packets. If the tweets of each account
are public, the accounts don't need to follow each other. Currently, only point
to point connections are possible, as specified by RFC1149.
How it works
============
The script needs one Twitter account. It registers the account via oAuth, so it
becomes accessible (see Authorization) and then pull tweets from it via Twitter's
streaming-API. Tweets are en-/decoded and (de-)fragmented using packaging
helper (see Encoding). Incoming tweets are parsed as incoming traffic, outgoing
traffic is fragmented, encoded and then tweeted.
Authorization
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The script needs to be associated with Twitter through oAuth. If it is started
without credentials, it gives you a link to twitter.com with a generated token
and then asks for a PIN. After entering the PIN the script is fully
authorized to both tweet and read tweets. The ACCESS_KEY and ACCESS_SECRET are
saved into conf_auth.py.
If the script already has an ACCESS_KEY and ACCESS_SECRET you won't be asked
for credentials again.
Encoding
~~~~~~~~
A tweet's maximum length is 140 characters. One character for twitter is one
unicode character, meaning that one character can encode 20 bits (current
uncode range is 0x0-0x110000). In vRFC1149's implementation two bytes are
encoded in each character, leaving 4 bit of each char for metadata (the
header).
Sadly twitter removes, mangles or augmentates some of
the characters. For more information about this look into the comments in the
source (phelper.UPHelper.reassembleBrokenChars()).
An alternative approach is to just tweet everything plain, reducing the payload
of a tweet to 138 bytes (2 bytes reserved for header). Nevertheless, twitter
transforms certain characters (<,> to <, >), so a workarround is needed,
too.
All available packaging helpers can be found in phelper.py.
Twitter API Limits
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Twitter allows each client to do 1000 tweets a day. When considering a
continuous connection and a tweet size of 280 bytes, the average speed is about
3byte/s (273kb/day). Additional, twitter breaks down the 1000 tweets to an
unspecified hourly limit.
RFC1149 compability
===================
This implementation of RFC1149 does not reach 100% compability, since the
general tweet comes without a leg on which the message could be taped to.
Also, no duct tape is used (no taping whatsoever).
Regarding the encoding, one could write a packaging helper more compatible
with the RFC's frame format (hexadecimal representation with seperated octets).
As a side effect, it would reduce the payload of one tweet to 46 bytes.
What could be done
==================
* create network topologies with Twitter's "following" feature
* support multiple clients
* create a table of characters which are not "eaten" by twitter or what they
get transformed to
Licensing
=========
Written by Sebastian Lohff <seba@seba-geek.de>
Published under the GPLv3 or later
Sebastian Lohff
358cd6a364