Disappearing messages, symmetric and from send time (§6.11)

The relay has had per-conversation lifetimes since the port and **no client
could set one** — its own comment says so. For E2E conversations the server
timer would not have helped anyway: it expires rows in the legacy plaintext
table, not the envelopes these apps actually exchange. So this is client-side,
which is also the only place it can be honest.

**Symmetric.** Either party sets the timer; the other is told inside the ratchet
and adopts it. A timer only the setter honoured would be worse than none — they
would believe their words were gone from a phone still holding them.

**Inside the ratchet**, so the relay never learns that a conversation is timed,
let alone for how long. It rides as ordinary control traffic carrying the `ctl`
flag from §6.10, which is what makes it safe to add at all: without that, this
envelope would surface in every older install as an "[unsupported attachment]"
bubble.

**Expiry runs on read**, in `Vault.history`. A sweep on a timer leaves expired
messages on disk between runs, and a disappearing message still sitting in the
vault is a claim rather than a feature. Reading is the one path every caller
shares, so nothing can see — or keep — an expired message.

⚠️ **Ages come from this device's own timestamp**, not one the peer supplies.
"From send time" in practice means when this device sent or received it, which
differs by seconds and cannot be manipulated: a peer who chose the clock could
backdate a message so it vanished from your phone immediately, or forward-date
one so it never expired.

⚠️ **A message with no timestamp is kept.** Those predate the field, and an
unknown age is not evidence of an old one — deleting somebody's history on a
guess cannot be undone.

The panel sits on the thread rather than in a menu, because "fewer taps to turn
it on" and "clearer per-conversation state" are the same problem: a timer nobody
can see is one nobody trusts. Presets only — arbitrary durations are the ones
nobody can reason about later.

engine 155, client 94, app 32.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul Hitt
2026-08-29 11:23:04 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 4.8
parent c9e386ec0d
commit f9f063a211
8 changed files with 471 additions and 4 deletions
@@ -178,6 +178,45 @@ class ContentTest {
}
}
/**
* Disappearing-message timers (§6.11).
*
* 🔴 The timer travels **inside the ratchet**. Sent any other way the relay
* would learn that a conversation is timed and for how long — metadata this
* feature exists to avoid producing, on a product whose claim is that the
* server knows as little as possible.
*/
@Test
fun `a disappearing timer round-trips and is control traffic`() {
val parsed = Content.parse(Content.disappearing(86_400))
assertEquals(Content.Kind.DISAPPEAR, parsed.kind)
assertEquals(86_400, Content.disappearSeconds(parsed))
assertTrue(parsed.isControl, "the timer is never shown as a message")
assertFalse(parsed.isRenderable)
}
/** Zero is how the timer is turned off, and must survive as zero. */
@Test
fun `turning the timer off round-trips as zero`() {
val parsed = Content.parse(Content.disappearing(0))
assertEquals(0, Content.disappearSeconds(parsed))
}
/**
* ⚠️ `fnc` must stay the first key. The marker is a prefix test, so a
* reordered top level makes the envelope decode as a plain text message —
* raw JSON in somebody's conversation.
*/
@Test
fun `the timer envelope starts with the marker`() {
assertTrue(Content.disappearing(60).startsWith("""{"fnc":1,"""))
}
@Test
fun `asking a non-timer envelope for its timer gives nothing`() {
assertNull(Content.disappearSeconds(Content.parse(Content.text("hello"))))
}
@Test
fun `an unknown attachment kind shows a label rather than disappearing`() {
val parsed = Content.parse("""{"fnc":1,"kind":"hologram"}""")