Paul Hitt
ec03f469c7
Item 4. Three consecutive rounds of the Android on-device suite (18 tests each) and three of the iOS sign-in suite (7 each), all green, against a real relay. `Scripts/rounds.sh N` runs every layer that can run on a given machine and prints one line per layer per round -- because "three clean rounds" should be a command, not a ritual somebody performs from memory and reports on. ⚠️ **A skipped layer prints SKIP, never a pass.** A round that silently did nothing looks exactly like a round that worked; that is how a suite stops meaning anything. The shared-account rounds needed rethinking rather than retrying. The account service allows **three registrations per address per hour**, deliberately -- forty sign-in attempts is a person with a password manager and a bad afternoon, forty accounts is a flood. Three sign-UPS per shape consumes an hour's budget for one shape and fails the next, so a test written that way measures the rate limiter rather than the product. So sign-up is proven once per shape and the repeatable part is what a person actually repeats: sign in, register a device, be reachable -- three rounds, asserting every round lands on the SAME relay account. The relay keys on the product-scoped pseudonym rather than the handle, and if it keyed on the handle each round would quietly make a new account and nobody would notice until messages stopped arriving. Fresh-registration rounds stay on the local shape, which has no such limit because a self-hosted relay is not a shared service. ⚠️ The backoff no longer pretends it can outwait an hour. It fails with the actual constraint spelled out, because a correct defence dressed up as a flaky test is worse than either.
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.