Hush Messenger: Secure E2E Messaging on the Hush Blockchain

mreichardt (39)in #crypto • 7 years ago (edited)

The current state of secure messaging on-chain is pretty abysmal. End-users generally have to type out their messages in a text editor, copy-paste them into a very finite selection of wallets that have enabled message signing, copy-paste that result, and send the recipient this plus the end-users address. This method is archaic, slow, and not user-friendly.

Hush Messenger brings features that the current ecosystem cannot provide. A fully functioning, secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging experience powered by the Hush blockchain (with lateral compatibility to any Zcash-based blockchain). Myself and @radix42 have jointly developed these abstraction layers and tool-sets to make it easy for you, our end-user, to secure one of the most important pieces of private information: your communications.

Design

We have started with a solid foundation, a good, clean layout. This will give our users access to one of the most polished experiences in this segment with clean lines, thoughtful colors, and built-in accessibility options. The message editor has been streamlined for full-text input powered by Markdown including: paragraphs, images, and the ability to attach binary files via IPFS integration.

Application

Under the hood we are using a secured SQlite3 database to keep everything local, reducing threat vectors. Every piece of information that enters the database is fully encrypted on every request-response cycle. This is accomplished by generating a set of taddr/zaddr on initial Hush Messenger setup and using the private keys as the encryption seed.

This style of encryption ensures that:

Only the intended recipient(s) will see and be able to read messages - yes multi-party messaging will exist!
No one else will see that a message was between parties
Your data will always be secure so long as your maintain custody of your private keys.

Communication with Hush

Hush Messenger runs on-top of the Hush Blockchain. This means that you must have a working version of hushd runing, preferably as a daemon (Linux: ./hushd --daemon or Windows: hushd.exe --daemon).

Final Thoughts

We hope you enjoyed this small intro into the next major milestone for Hush and our team. We are excited for the future of the project and the promise that applications like Hush Messenger can bring to people around the world. This world every-increasingly needs a set of secure messaging tools with a great user experience to combat the threats that the modern computing era has created. We hope that you will end up choosing Hush and Hush Messenger to power your decentralized finance and messaging needs.