Development in 2025

Hey everyone,

welcome to the recap of my development from 2025. It has been another year and I put a lot of effort into improving the GNUnet Messenger again. As part of completing my study, I developed a concept for forward secrecy in distributed group contexts. Then I implemented and tested that concept within the GNUnet Messenger service. Also GNUnet made huge jumps in terms of progress over the year apart from the Messenger service as well.

There are still open ends to reach “perfect forward secrecy” for example which I outlined in my master thesis but tackling those ends is planned. Additionally I started adding colors to the messenger-cli application using ncurses and the porting of messenger-gtk from GTK3 to GTK4 began. Most of these efforts could be completed next year.

Other changes went into the GNUnet Messenger service to improve security against attackers gaining access to identity keys. With those changes private encrypted messages stay private but as mentioned in my last blog post from November, I need to put a bit of effort into libgnunetchat managing secrets for encrypting the asymmetric private keys used for decrypting those private messages.

When those things are done, I might start implementing a solution for async message transfer without central mailbox. So far my idea is to utilize GNUnet’s DHT to store messages in an encrypted form accessible to all peers in their messenger room. However the actual peers storing those DHT entries don’t need to participate in the actual messenger room for that. Only important aspect is that they can’t reverse engineer the message graph or the message content.

Additionally I want to add that all peers routing messages inside a messenger room setup a fallback peer. So that in case they loose connection all clients find an alternative route immediately. This should also make invitations to messenger rooms much more reliable.

But sure, most of this is future talk. What else happened this year? Well, I started my career as self-employed game developer. There haven’t been any public posts about this so far because I don’t want to share my current project yet. Because a lot details have changed during the process. It’s about three months into development and my plan is to finish a first version in the first quarter of 2026. I’ve already learned a lot using Godot as game engine and I’m still targeting desktop and mobile devices with Linux-native binaries of course.

Oh and by the way developing games hasn’t lead to a lot of GPU specific code yet but I did a ton of memory management to tweak performance on different hardware. Because who could have guessed, even open-source game engines have limits and bottlenecks. But don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad with my choice of tools so far.

I’ve also took part in the GlobalGameJam with others again this year. Then I participated in a LudumDare alone to challenge myself. I will probably continue with these events in the next year and maybe I might even post here about it. So expect a bit more artwork and entertainment on this blog. I’ll still try to contribute to my free software projects of choice.

Besides the messaging and game development, I fixed a few bugs here and there in Manuskript, merged a bunch of contributions and struggled with Windows false-flagging the binaries built with the CI on Github (owned by Microsoft). I’m really at the point to not care a ton anymore when Windows blocks its own users from using free software and it seems like I’m not alone with this anymore.

You guys might have noticed that some people bragged online about the year of the Linux desktop over the last months and for the first time, they might have a point. At least I personally noticed more and more people which I would have never expected to care about free software to talk about Linux… in their videos, podcasts or live-streams. All I can say at this point is that I recommend everyone to give free software alternatives a fair chance. You might like it more than you think and people like myself try to give you more reasons to do so next year.

Best regards and happy hacking,
Jacki

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