Paul HittandClaude Opus 5
c893d412d2
The Android engine had primitives and no protocol: no handshake, no ratchet, no session. It could verify a safety number and could not start a conversation. X3DH is the first half of fixing that. The four agreements are mixed in the order the spec fixes, and DH4 is omitted rather than zero-filled when the one-time prekey pool is drained. Both are choices that produce 32 plausible bytes when wrong — the failure lands at the far end as a message that will not decrypt, pointing nowhere near here, so the tests check that the two sides AGREE rather than that either looks right. Keys are JCA objects rather than raw bytes throughout, because Conscrypt will not build an XDH key from raw bytes and wants a DER spec. Passing raw bytes would work on this JVM and throw on the first tap on a phone, which this engine has already been bitten by once. Also here: AccountKdf, so Android can derive an account key and an address. Checked against the vectors pinned from the enclave client — including the non-ASCII and empty-passphrase cases, where a CharArray API and a UTF-8 wire format quietly disagree. ⚠️ Still missing before an Android app can send a message: the Double Ratchet, a session layer, a wire client, and the app itself. 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.