Paul Hitt
ca626b3368
Item 7: the comparison, landing and donation pages were written on a branch and never deployed, so the live site described a product that stopped being accurate several changes ago. Cherry-picked and deployed; the comparison page now says relays federate, that an address is derived rather than issued, and why federating is a trade rather than a win. Donation flow verified end to end against production keys: out-of-range amounts are refused before Stripe is contacted at all, and a valid amount creates a real Checkout Session and redirects to it. No payment was made -- an unpaid session expires on its own. ⚠️ I could NOT verify with test keys: there is no Stripe test key on the box, and inventing one proves nothing. Item 9, which is a narrower claim than it looks and worth testing exactly: **hosting only Messenger leaves nothing missing.** Proven three ways -- a local relay names no account service at all, runs a full sign-up and sign-in cycle with nothing else involved, and never probes for Files. And when the shared service IS used, one handle and passphrase signs in to both Messenger and Files. The two sessions carry DIFFERENT pseudonyms, which is the point rather than a detail: same-pseudonym would let the two services correlate their users, which is exactly what a shared account service must not enable. A Files-scoped token is also refused by the Messenger relay -- the product scope is a boundary, not a label. ⚠️ The shared-account tests now back off and retry on the account service's rate limit, because a dozen registrations in a burst is something any sane service should refuse. They still fail if it never clears: a rate limit that does not lift is a real problem, and skipping on it would hide one.
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.