I love the direction that zbay is going in, there are lots of interesting ideas and considerations at play. One thing in particular though concerns me about this application.
support journalists and whistle-blowers by building the most secure and convenient way to communicate without revealing one’s identity.
This is a very bold claim - the risk profile for journalists communicating with sources has very deep roots and lots of potential pitfalls, pivoting a marketplace app to one that is suitable for such a risk models - especially in such a short time period - seems like it needs further thinking through.
Once these objectives are reached there will still be much more work to be done, but we believe we’ll have a minimum viable product for secure communication that is as anonymous in principle as other Tor-based options but more convenient and easy-to-use, which is a big deal!
I wouldn’t be comfortable in taking a minimal-viable product approach - especially when considering the security of products like SecureDrop that have gone through such intense real world testing and consider a large variety of potential threats.
I would strongly suggest that the timeline for this grant is reevaluated to include a period of threat modelling up front in line with the journalist interviews to really drive the requirement set and feature prioritization - and toning down the security and privacy claims until they can be backed up - and to explicitly include the cost of external review - if this is a direction to move forward in then it is worth doing right.
Not that I don’t love the ambition inherent in joining together funding and source communication, and all the other potential directions this project could go in, but if we want to be taken seriously then we must take these threat models seriously.