Ember: A Serverless Peer-to-Peer End-to-End Encrypted Messaging System over an IPv6 Mesh Network
🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a serverless, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging system to mitigate privacy risks inherent in traditional architectures that rely on centralized servers. Leveraging a decentralized IPv6 mesh network for peer-to-peer communication, the system innovatively integrates end-to-end encryption, ciphertext-only local storage, and a timestamp-driven message expiration mechanism. This design explicitly delineates trust boundaries and adheres rigorously to the data minimization principle. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the system leaks no plaintext information in network traffic, achieving strong privacy guarantees while remaining practically deployable on the Android platform.
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📝 Abstract
This paper presents Ember, a serverless peer-to-peer messaging system providing end-to-end encrypted communication over a decentralised IPv6 mesh network. Ember operates without central servers, enforces data minimisation through ciphertext-only local storage and time-based message expiration, and prioritises architectural clarity, explicit trust boundaries, and practical deployability on Android. The paper describes the system architecture, cryptographic design, network model, and security properties -- including dynamic testing results demonstrating that no plaintext is recoverable from captured network traffic -- and discusses limitations and future work
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
serverless
peer-to-peer
end-to-end encryption
IPv6 mesh network
secure messaging
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
serverless
peer-to-peer
end-to-end encryption
IPv6 mesh network
data minimisation
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