Jacki's Developer Blog

Hello there, so I got some news for you again regarding my progress on the GNUnet Messenger service as well as the applications. Because there has been a GNUnet release last month which made libgnunetchat and the messenger applications using it incompatible, I needed to implement some changes, fixes and announced a new release . The forward secrecy I’m implementing in the Messenger service of GNUnet is still on development branch though. It will take some time until those changes are ready for release. But I got quite a bit of progress. The members of a chat actually start building groups, exchanging keys to form a tree structure as suggested in my last post from December . If any member of such a group is missing an epoch key, they will delay depending on their position inside their group the appeal for the missing key to then authorize the whole group after gaining access. This way ideally just one member will send an appeal, receive access, send an authorization and the rest of ...

Hey everyone, welcome to my yearly recap of the year 2024. What happened? What did I work on? Well, quite a lot actually. So let’s start with the biggest project and continue from there. The GNUnet Messenger got funding from NLnet again as I mentioned in the end of last year. The new goal was to improve usability and add new features. What features are we talking about exactly? My concept was to achieve feature parity with most popular messaging apps but sticking to a decentralized context. For example I wanted to add profile pictures. But we can’t simply upload image files to a profile picture server/provider and poll from there for any new contact we get. So the solution required a bit of hacking around in the back-end. I used reclaimID from GNUnet to allow users sharing personal information with selected contacts of their choice and profile pictures may be such personal information for example. That means we can upload encrypted image files to a decentralized file sharing ser...