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Comment by dokument | Hacker News Reader

Project: Distributed, trustless, anonymous, encrypted, messenger/mailer with the goal of hiding senders and receivers of messages. Also can't be brought down since it is distributed.

Problem: Limited time to work on it. I have a working prototype with one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many messaging/mailing working fully encrypted over ipv4. Building out the transport methods is the next main task (ipv4 works, need ipv6/tor/i2p/file/qr/etc).

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You might find Ethereum's Whisper messaging protocol interesting.

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Whisper

I'm curious about your cryptographic schema. Are you using encryption-by-proxy to hide the sender/receiver?

How are you making them anonymous?

Elliptical curve asymmetrical keys for the actual encryption. No encryption by proxy by default. Basically think of a shared database where you don't know who inserts data or who selects data. Making all payloads the same size, and constantly transmitting/receiving at a set rate ensures that even your isp can't tell if you are the sender or receiver of a message. The security/anonymity levels are adjustable so you don't have to use the features if you'd rather not. Also with shared asymetrical keys, users can communicate without having to sign/identify themselves within the message. This also provides plausible deniability. There are a lot more layers, but I'll keep it brief here.

Like Ricochet (https://ricochet.im/)?

Kind of, but more anonymous and not tied to tor. More like Bitmessage (https://bitmessage.org) but with a fresh approach. You can connect via tor (tor-tor) and talk to people on i2p, or clearnet, sneakernet, etc.

Sounds really interesting. Would you mind shooting me an email at aakil at safezero dot org?

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