Paul HittandClaude Opus 5
8a3770f1d1
An app does not use X3DH and a ratchet, it uses "send this string to that person". This is that layer: device identities with prekeys and rotation, envelopes as the relay actually carries them, and sessions that survive being put away and taken out again. 11 unit tests, and the interop harness grows from 23 assertions to 37 -- the new ones at the envelope level, which is where this protocol's one shipped bug lived. A client and a relay disagreed about a field name and nothing caught it until a live round trip; hand-assembled arguments to X3DH would not have. Kotlin now builds a whole envelope, the web engine's own session layer parses it, and both directions agree on the associated data. Three decisions worth stating. Retired signed prekeys are kept for longer than the relay keeps undelivered mail. A sender fetches a bundle, encrypts against that prekey id, and the envelope can then sit in a queue for the relay's full retention window. Discarding the private half at rotation turns every one of those into an AEAD failure -- which the receiving client cannot distinguish from an attack. A prekey retired past retention is refused outright rather than guessed at, for the same reason: guessing derives a garbage secret and reports it as tampering. The handshake block rides every message until one is answered, not until one is sent. Any message may be the first to arrive. Sessions archive with their skipped message keys, and the harness proves it against the peer rather than against our own bytes. Those keys are the messages already in flight; an archive that drops them loses exactly the mail that was in the air when the app was killed. The failure this whole path exists to prevent is a client that loses session state, re-registers a device, and shows every contact "security keys changed" -- the warning that is supposed to mean an attack. `org.json` is compileOnly: it is in the Android framework, so it costs nothing on a phone and bundling a copy would shadow the platform's. Safe only because the two encodings that must match byte-for-byte -- the ratchet header and the canonical log leaf -- are built by hand; Android's implementation preserves key order and the reference one does not. Also adds PARITY.md: what the iOS app does, what Android does, what is left. It is the definition of done, and a row moves only when something tests it. 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.