Back from Hackaton ETHBerlin Zwei

Story and presentation of our project: Omerta

Published in

Rockside

5 min readSep 3, 2019

After a week of recovery, here is a short story of our experience of the Hackaton ETHBerlin Zwei in Berlin, a combination of a hackathon, experiences, workshops and talks, happening from 21st to 25th of August 2019 in Berlin, Germany.

More than a Hackathon, ETHBerlin Zwei is a kind of festival for Hackers

Friday: H-hour -36

💡Find a motivating idea…

We signed up with a vague project idea and a team of 3 motivated rockside.io developers (Tangui, Nicolas and me).

The idea was adding a layer of privacy on top of the current social networks (Facebook, Twitter, …) by encrypting the messages just before sending them to the servers. Our service also allows the sender to control who can decrypt these messages thanks to Ethereum. We wanted to create a service that is almost invisible to the user, we wanted to hide the entire technical mechanism.

All of this must be done in 36 hours… of course ;)

People use Twitter and Facebook and it is not going to change soon. People have their habits and above all, their friends and their network are on it and that create a significant retention of users.

Finally, in an ideal world we could continue to use our favorite social networks by adding a feature that would give us a real control of our data.

Omertà is a Southern Italian code of silence and code of honor that places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders; non-cooperation with authorities, the government, or outsiders; wikipedia

Starting from this idea, we imagined browser extension which resolve that, as smooth as possible, for users of these social networks. The whole presentation of the project is available on Github.

Saturday: H-hour -32

🤠 over-confidence period!

We arrived at the Factory well rested and very confident. We identified a number of technical challenges, we only had to gently code to finish…
As usual in the development, nothing worked as expected.

Injecting code and watching for events is not that simple, parsing the DOM was a hard task as the JS/HTML/CSS code from Facebook and Twitter is automatically generated, at each reload, all ID change.
We knew it’s theoretically possible to encrypt a message with an Ethereum public key but we’d never tried to do so.
Fork Metamask should save us time, but we are not sure of the result.

Saturday: H-hour -25

😰 The real rush

All the bricks (almost) work, so it was time to start the next step: merge everything in our chrome extension.

A script injected into an HTML page decrypts messages and replaces them on the fly.
The eth-crypto library does the job well and we share secrets on Ethereum (PGP like) on Ropsten.
We dropped the Facebook scrapper as our tests on Twitter was more conclusive.
After a quick test, we decided to create our own Chrome Extension (and gave up the idea of using our Metamask fork)
Create Scripts to retrieve a specific tx by a sheme in the data (omerta:userid:encryptedsecret)

Saturday: H-hour -8

🐛 Bug time

Importing Node.js libraries in our Chrome extension was a big hassle. Depending on screen sizes or twitter themes, our scrapper/crawler didn’t work. At that time, we were already exhausted and we knew we’d have to code all night long to deliver something... No choice, here we go!

Sunday: H-hour -5

😌 relief time

Finally, we have a demo that runs! it’s already a huge relief… omerta is live! Well, not exactly, The Chrome extension runs only our machines, but it’s still a nice achievement.

Video of Omerta on Twitter

Sunday: H-hour

❤️chill time

Without having time to work our pitch, we pushed the code and arranged the README file until the last minutes to try to highlight our project, we quickly regretted not having a polished pitch… Too bad, we’ll do better next time, Now, we can finally enjoy this exceptional place.

Sunday: H-hour+4

💻 Demo Time

We did a demo in which we use our real twitter accounts: Nicolas and myself are friends and can read our twitter message in clear while Tangui, who is not in our mafia (our circle of friends) only has access to encrypted messages. (see the video above)

Our presentation was confusing and we lacked of preparation and 10 minutes is really short! Even though our demo was really bad, it worked and we were proud to demonstrate that using Twitter with end-to-end encryption is technically possible.

Sunday night — The results

Despite good feedback from the jury, our project was not selected. It’s hard but the level was high (730 attendees & 88 hack submissions) and successfully demonstrate our idea feasibility in such a short time was our main goal, so in a way, it’s win for us!

This experience was very rewarding, the atmosphere was really special and the organization was perfect. Finally, we are proud to build with this incredible Ethereum community.