Community Center

About Community Center Android App

Community Center is an service application which can be used by client Android applications for transferring data over Wi-Fi network between trusted devices, or sharing data among devices is some group. The Wi-Fi network doesn't have to have an Internet access. The transferred data is protected by the security certificate which is generated when your device joins a community. Thus, your data is protected even if the communicating devices are in untrustworthy Wi-Fi network.

IMPORTANT: Community Center never encrypts existing data on your device nor stores any encrypted data on persistent storage of your device. This also applies to the private data of the client applications. Also, Community Center never sends any encrypted data over the Internet. Protection is only applied to the data channel between devices in the local Wi-Fi network.

To start a new community:
- Open the "Communities" tab
- Press Add menu button
- In a dialog box type in a community name. You won't be able to change it later because the name is embedded into the certificate.
- Press OK and wait until the root certificate is generated.
- Now you can adopt new members. Your new community is set to discoverable mode by default. You can change that by clicking the checkbox next to the community name.

To join an existing community you should go through a pairing procedure:
- Make sure your device is in the same Wi-Fi network with the community owner
- Make sure the community you want to join is set to discoverable mode on the owner's device.
- Open the "Communities" tab
- Press Join menu button and wait a while until discovery is finished
- Select the community you want to join in a dialog box
- You'll be asked to confirm security number on both devices
- The owner may choose to grant you permissions to take on new members into the community
- Then the owner app will generate the certificate for you.
- Now you're done. As soon as your device in the same network with another community member (not necessarily the owner), they will be connected automatically, and the other device will appear in the "Devices" tab.