Paul HittandClaude Opus 5
e0589eff14
The second half of a protocol Android did not have. With X3DH it can now agree a secret, and with this it can hold a conversation. Two ratchets: the symmetric one advances per message so a compromised key reveals nothing earlier, the DH one advances on each direction change so a conversation recovers from compromise rather than staying broken. The tests run conversations rather than checking steps, because that is what catches the bugs this code actually has. X3DH is a pure function — it agrees or it does not. A ratchet can agree for six messages and diverge on the seventh because one side counted a skipped message differently, and the symptom is only that something will not decrypt. So: out-of-order delivery, a message lost forever, a gap ACROSS a direction change (which is the whole reason "pn" is on the wire), and four DH turns in sequence. Three things that would each produce plausible-but-wrong bytes, so each is tested rather than reasoned about: - the sending chain advances BEFORE the key is used, so a caller that retries cannot encrypt twice under one key — two GCM encryptions under one key and nonce leak the XOR of both plaintexts - the header's canonical JSON is hand-built, key order "dh, pn, n", no spaces, because it goes into the AAD and three implementations must reproduce it byte-for-byte - the derived nonce is stripped from the wire rather than sent, so a receiver cannot be handed a nonce that disagrees with the one its key implies MAX_SKIP caps derivation at 1000: a header claiming a huge counter costs the sender nothing and the receiver everything. 13 tests. Still missing before an app: 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.