Astral - Secure AI-powered Communication System + Mobile App

August 15, 2024

Overview

Astral is an AI-powered, secure communication system, ensuring the safe transmission of sensitive information across hostile and remote environments. The project integrates AI-based self-healing network infrastructure and encryption that resists even the most sophisticated attacks. Additionally, it features a mobile app with a disguised interface to further enhance operational security.

Key Features

AI-Powered Network: The system employs AI algorithms to continuously monitor network health and execute self-healing procedures, ensuring communication remains uninterrupted even under attacks or network failures.
Unbreakable Encryption: Integrated end-to-end encryption mechanisms resistant to cyber threats, ensuring all transmitted data remains secure, confidential, and unbreakable.
Stealth Mobile App: The app interface is disguised as a solar system information display. Only upon performing a specific combination of gestures does the app reveal its true functionality, further safeguarding against unauthorized access.
Real-time Communication: Secure text-sharing features, designed for low-bandwidth environments, ensuring real-time communication without sacrificing security.

Technologies Used

Flutter and Dart: For building the cross-platform mobile application with a seamless user experience.
Python: To develop the AI engine managing the network infrastructure (Self-Healing Network) and encryption protocols.
AES-256 + Vernam Cipher: Used a hybrid encryption method to create unbreakable security for data transmission.

Challenges and Learnings

Network Resilience: The most significant challenge was designing a self-healing network that could operate efficiently even in remote and challenging environments with limited connectivity. AI-powered monitoring and automation played a critical role in overcoming this challenge.
User Interface Security: Designing a highly secure, disguised mobile app was another challenge. Ensuring that the gesture-triggered access remained foolproof while keeping it user-friendly for authorized personnel was a key learning experience.

Deep Dive: The Architecture of Astral

Astral is a highly secure AI-powered communication system built on three core pillars:

A self-healing AI-driven network
Unbreakable encryption using hybrid cryptographic techniques
A stealth-based disguised mobile application

Each of these components is designed to ensure that communications remain secure, even in hostile or high-risk environments.

1. The AI-Powered Self-Healing Network

The backbone of Astral is its self-healing network, which is built using a decentralized mesh topology. Each device in the network functions as a node, and communication flows dynamically between these nodes.

🔹 Node Monitoring & Failure Detection

Every node in the network is classified as alive or dead.
A central AI-powered controller constantly probes each node to verify its status.
If a node becomes unresponsive, the system marks it as dead and triggers a rollback mechanism.

🔹 Automated Self-Healing & Rerouting

The AI controller rolls back the dead node to the last known working state using stored snapshots of the node’s code.
Once rolled back, the node is restarted and reintegrated into the network.
While recovery is in progress, the network dynamically reroutes connections to maintain seamless communication.
This constant healing mechanism makes it extremely difficult for attackers to compromise the network, as any intrusion attempts are automatically counteracted.

2. The Hybrid Encryption System

To ensure unbreakable security, Astral employs a hybrid encryption model combining:
✅ AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard) - A symmetric encryption method used for speed and efficiency.
✅ Vernam Cipher (One-Time Pad) - A theoretically unbreakable encryption method when keys are truly random.

🔹 Encryption Process

Step 1: AES-256 Encryption
- The plaintext message is encrypted using AES-256 with a randomly generated key.
Step 2: Vernam Cipher Layer
- The AES-encrypted output is then XOR-ed with a one-time pad key (Vernam Cipher).
- This adds an extra layer of security, making decryption virtually impossible without the exact key.
Step 3: Device-Specific Targeting
- Each message contains a receiver ID.
- The message is broadcasted across the network and only the intended recipient can decrypt it, as only their device will have the correct decryption key.

🔹 Decryption Process

The receiver ID is matched with a device.
The Vernam Cipher layer is reversed using the one-time pad key.
The AES-256 decryption is applied to retrieve the original message.
The message is displayed securely on the app.

🚀 Why this is powerful?

Even if an attacker intercepts the message, they cannot decrypt it because they would need both the AES key and the one-time pad, which are only stored on the sender and receiver devices.

3. The Stealth-Based Disguised Mobile Application

Astral’s mobile app is designed with two layers to ensure security even if a phone is seized or compromised.

🔹 Layer 1: The Fake "Planets App"

On the surface, the app appears to be a harmless educational tool about the solar system.
Users can browse through fake astronomy content about planets.
There are no visible indicators of any communication functionality.

🔹 Layer 2: Hidden Secure Communication Interface

To access the real messaging system, a user must enter a 3-digit passcode.
Each digit corresponds to a planet's position in the solar system (e.g., 3 = Earth, 6 = Saturn).
The user must tap the planets in the correct sequence and then click an invisible button to unlock the real app.