Paul HittandClaude Opus 5
6f83248e1c
A relay's `user_id` is a row number it assigned itself, and the account service's pseudonym is HMAC'd per product precisely so two services cannot correlate their users. Neither survives a trip to a second relay, so nothing addressed by either can cross a relay boundary — which is the first thing federation needs, and the reason a deleted relay currently takes its users' names with it. So identity becomes a key the client derives and holds: Ed25519, stretched from the passphrase under `flamenet/account/identity/v1`, alongside the per-product keys that already work this way. The public half, Crockford base32, is the address. Derived rather than generated, so the same passphrase reproduces the same fnid on a device that never held it — re-register the same key at a new relay and contacts who pinned it are still talking to the same person. Relay: `users.account_key` / `users.fnid` (unique in the database, not just in the handler), `POST /e2e/account/identity` to claim by proving possession, and `GET /e2e/account/identity/:handle` to resolve. The claim signature binds the audience, the local user id and the key itself; dropping any one of the three lets a claim be replayed at another relay, lifted onto another account here, or transplanted onto another key. Verification uses the very key being registered, so the relay confirms possession and never acquires an opinion about whose key it is. Rotation is refused rather than silently overwritten — a new address strands every contact that pinned the old one, and that needs a migration record they can follow. Log leaves go v1 -> v2, binding a subject instead of a row number: `fnid:<b32>` where an account has enrolled, `local:<audience>/<user_id>` where it has not. The fallback is qualified rather than bare because a device can be registered before its key is claimed, and the alternatives were worse in both directions — skipping those devices leaves a hole in the one record that must not have holes, and logging them unqualified produces leaves that mean different things depending on origin with nothing in the leaf to say so. This is not a server-side change. All three engines hash the leaf and two of them verify it against the relay, and a published vector pins the exact bytes, so the format moves in one commit or not at all. Existing v1 leaves keep their hashes and are backfilled to a self-describing `legacy-v1/` subject: the log is append-only, and a format change is not a licence to rewrite history. The version prefix sits inside the hashed bytes so a v1 leaf recomputed under v2 rules fails rather than verifying against a different subject. Green: engine conformance 80, relay §8 suite 235 (10 new), JS<->Swift interop 74, Kotlin published vectors. Two things found on the way, neither addressed here: - iOS never calls `enforceKeyLog`. It and `requireKeyLog` are both declared in E2EInbox and nothing reads either, so §19 is dead code on that client while the JS one wires it. The subject is threaded through ready for a caller. - `engine/test/interop/build.sh` prefers ~/Code/flamenetmessenger over the checkout it is run from, so in a worktree it silently builds the wrong sources and reports a *skip* rather than a failure. Set FNMSG_APP_DIR. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Flamenet Messenger — Android
Nothing here is an app yet. This is the engine, and it is deliberately first.
An Android client needs the protocol implemented a third time. That third
implementation is the one that finds the places where the specification says
less than the two existing engines quietly agreed on — but only if it is
written against the spec and the published vectors rather than against a
reading of our own Swift and JavaScript. So the engine comes first, it is a
plain Kotlin/JVM library with no Android in it at all, and it is held to
engine/test/vectors/protocol-v1.json — the same file the other two engines
are checked against, read from that one location rather than copied here.
./gradlew :engine:test
No Android SDK, no emulator, no device. It runs anywhere a JVM does, which is also what lets it run in CI on Linux.
What the engine covers today
| Area | Spec | State |
|---|---|---|
| Safety numbers | §7 | Done — fingerprints and conversation ordering match the published vectors |
| Key transparency verification | §19 | Done — RFC 6962 leaf/node hashing, unbalanced split, bottom-up audit paths |
| Byte helpers | — | Unsigned comparison, constant-time equality |
What it does not cover
Listed rather than left to be discovered, because a table of green ticks with the hard parts quietly missing is worse than no table:
| Area | Spec | State |
|---|---|---|
| X25519 / Ed25519 | §3 | Not started — needs a provider that works on both JVM and Android |
| X3DH key agreement | §4 | Not started |
| Double Ratchet | §6 | Not started |
| Sealed sender | §12 | Not started |
| ML-KEM-768 hybrid | §11 | Not started |
| ML-DSA-65 identities | §20 | Not started |
| Relay client | §8 | Not started |
| The app itself | — | Not started |
Until those exist, Android is honestly marked "not started" on the website, and a conversation gets the protocol's guarantees only when both ends are iOS.
Why the vectors matter more than the code
Two implementations that agree may both be wrong in the same way, especially when one was written while reading the other. The audit-path ordering in §19 is the worked example: a top-down reading of a bottom-up path produces the correct root for every left-spine index, so it passes any test that only checks index 0. The vector file pins a right-descending index for that reason, and the Kotlin tests assert both that the published path verifies and that the same path reversed does not.
If this engine ever disagrees with the file, the interesting question is which of the three is wrong — not this one by default.