Ciena P2P File Sharing

Update: Won 3rd place!

Ciena's peer-to-peer file sharing protocol challenge for Hack the Hill 2024. Built with Spring Boot for backend file transfering using HTTPS requests, and Next.js for the frontend.

Deployment

To deploy this project, first make sure you have docker installed. Then, run:

  docker-compose up --build

Docker will run both the back and frontend. To run each separately, you can run these for each:

  cd backend
  mvn spring-boot:run

  cd frontend
  npm run dev

The backend runs on localhost:8080 and the frontend runs on localhost:3000.

Implementation

• SSHs into a open source tunneling service to generate a random tunnel URL.
• Exposes localhost:8080 to the tunnel, people can connect by adding your tunnel as a node.
• Files are shared by the frontend calling the backend localhost:8080/upload with file metadata.
• Run a python script to chunk the file into 512-byte chunks of binary data.
• Iterates around all of the nodes, including self, sending chunks around.
• The backend can broadcast a request to get chunks, and all nodes will send their chunks to them. Chunks should overwrite for a simple redundancy system to ensure no files will be corrupted.
• Building a file will run a python script to build the file. The script will search for the metadata.json to know what the original file information is.
• The files can be accessed by the frontend by the Spring server's public static files after building.

Unfinished TODOs

• Add data usage tracker to monitor network activity
• Add a way to exchange requests when adding a new node and verify node exists, so that one user can send a request to pair both.
• Add CORS filtering for existing tunnels only for added security.