Voron

What it is

Nobody but you and the person you're talking to can read what you send — not us, not the server relaying it, not anyone watching the network in between. Every message is locked with a key that only the two of you ever hold, and that key keeps changing, so even someone who steals a phone can't unlock yesterday's conversation with it.

For the curious

An asynchronous key agreement in the shape of X3DH, with a Double Ratchet running on top of it, so a compromised key exposes neither what came before it nor what comes after. Group conversations use a sender-keys scheme with a client-side signed membership log, rather than trust anyone's server to say who's allowed to read what. An optional onion-routed transport keeps a connection's network address separate from the identity behind it.

The relay itself is built to know as little as possible: it forwards ciphertext, holds nothing longer than delivery takes, and has no concept of "a group" at all.

Groups

In a group chat, no company's server gets to quietly add or remove someone, or decide who's allowed to read what — only the people already in the group can. If someone's removed, the conversation moves on without them; nobody has to reset anything for everyone else.

For the curious

Membership isn't something the server gets to decide. Every join, leave, and key rotation is a signed event in a hash-chained log that every member holds and verifies independently — a group's history can be replayed and checked by anyone in it, not taken on the relay's word. Messages use per-sender ratcheting keys, so removing a member never requires re-keying everyone else's session.

Staying unlinkable

Encryption hides what you're saying. It doesn't automatically hide who you're saying it to — and that's often the more sensitive fact. Voron's relay only ever sees a rotating, throwaway address for your device, never its real one, so it can't build a picture of who talks to whom just by watching traffic pass through.

For the curious

A device's real key doesn't sit on the wire longer than it has to. Each connection registers a fresh, disposable alias with the relay and tells its contacts about it over the already-encrypted channel — a passive observer, or the relay itself, sees a rotating set of throwaway addresses rather than a fixed identity. An optional multi-hop onion transport goes a step further, separating a message's network origin from the device that sent it.

Calls & files

Voice and video calls connect straight between the two of you whenever possible, not through a server in the middle listening in. Photos, videos, and files travel the same encrypted way as your messages — nothing large gets special, weaker treatment just because it's bigger.

For the curious

Voice and video calls negotiate directly over WebRTC, falling back through TURN only when a direct path isn't possible — the relay is never in the media path. File transfers are chunked and encrypted the same way messages are; there's no separate, weaker channel for anything large.

Built on

• X3DH-lite & Double Ratchet — ChaCha20-Poly1305, Ed25519, X25519, HKDF
• Sender-keys group encryption with a signed hash-chain control log
• Rotating relay-facing aliases, authenticated bounce-on-expiry
• Multi-hop onion transport, fixed-size frame padding
• WebRTC calls (STUN/TURN) & chunked encrypted file transfer
• Native Android client · Kotlin/Ktor relay