Decentralized messaging application using PSS.
Onyx is a taster for our next phase of development on a fully-decentralized & incentivized network. It relies on a secure messaging protocol in the Ethereum core called PSS.
To install Onyx, download and install the latest release binaries for your platform from our releases page.
When you first install Onyx, you will be required to stake a Mainframe token (MFT) in order to connect and communicate with other nodes. Onyx guides you through this process. You will first need to create a wallet and make sure it has at least 1 MFT and a little ETH to submit the transaction with. This can be done on MyCrypto. You will be required to perform two transactions on the ethereum network.
Once you have the wallet ready, open the Onyx application and click the button entitled "Step 1 - Approve deposit of 1 MFT." This will open MyCrypto with the required transaction data pre-loaded. Before you submit the approval transaction, make sure you set the gas price high enough for the transaction to go through in a timely manner. This depends on network congestion. ETH Gas Station is a good place to go for current average gas prices.
After submitting the transaction, wait for it to be processed. Then click "Step 2 - Deposit 1 MFT and whitelist node." NOTE: do not alter the auto-generated address in the grey box. This will submit another transaction to MyCrypto, this time to perform the actual deposit so that your node can be allowed to use the Mainframe network.
After the transaction is complete, click on "Restart local node." You should now be able to use Onyx and connect with other Onyx users.
This application is an alpha product and is currently suitable for testing purposes only. As such, there is no guarantee of:
- Security: Our codebase is not fully tested. We authenticate both the client app and the mailboxing service and use TLS between the two, but any intruder who succeeded in accessing a remotely-installed service could read your messages, as they are stored in plaintext. Messages are transmitted via PSS, which is intended to be highly secure but is still beta software.
- Reliability: PSS does not provide deliverability guarantees. When remotely installed, however, the onyx-server is designed to store messages sent to you while you are offline. As long as PSS delivers them successfully to your mailboxing service, they should be waiting for you when you open your desktop or mobile app again. If you are running in the default mode, which runs the mailbox service only locally, any messages sent to you while your app is not running will be lost.
- Performance: We have not sufficiently tested this version for large-scale use. All messages are stored in a global state file that gets updated with each new message that is received. We anticipate that this will not scale well. The message store was created quickly for the alpha, and will require a more robust implementation in our next phase of development.
PSS & Swarm are currently in rapid development and as such, the build of swarm that we're currently using (to have a working PSS implementation) has the following known limitations from what is expected in the next release of swarm:
- Network Formation: The network discovery protocol is not currently usable which means that the nodes in the network cannot optimise their routing tables to ensure good routing of messages. In order to ensure routing despite this, all "client" nodes are configured to connect to the network through the same permanent bootnode.
- File Storage: The file storage functionality is not currently usable which means that files uploaded to swarm would not be fetchable later. In order to retain the file upload feature, we are running a separate swarm gateway on https://onyx-storage.mainframe.com using a different build of swarm with usable file storage.
Although this release is not officially supported, we really want to hear your feedback. If you become aware of a bug or have a great idea about a feature that would make Onyx more awesome, please submit an issue on our issues page.
Onyx is a privacy-focused messaging application that combines the desired features of today's best messaging tools while also maintaining the highest level of security and user sovereignty. The product consists of front-end client apps (mobile and desktop) that connect to a p2p networking node. This node can be run on the user's desktop (inside the Onyx electron wrapper) or deployed to the cloud.
An Onyx node consists of a p2p node with a messaging layer and various services necessary for storing messages and managing contacts. It makes use of the Swarm distributed storage platform and PSS secure messaging protocol for message delivery and file storage. Later development milestones will include more rich messaging features, and incentivization for reliable message delivery.
PSS is a connectionless communication protocol that provides dark routing capabilities in addition to conventional cryptography. A configurable level of per-message routing information allows senders to choose how specific they wish to be about whom their message is addressed to. By omitting or partially omitting the recipient’s address, messages are delivered to all matching addresses, thus increasing the difficulty of identifying both sender and receiver amidst numerous duplicate messages, or of targeting specific nodes for attack or disruption. These features enable extremely secure communications. Given networks of sufficient size, dark routing makes it virtually impossible to detect messaging activity between specific nodes. The only reliable means of disrupting this communication is to disable general Internet access.
After you pull this repository, to install all the dependencies run
yarn
The app requires an onyx-server instance to connect to - you will be prompted when you state the app. This can be run separately, following the instructions in that repository, or can be run locally inside the electron process. To run locally, binaries for geth and swarm are required, and can be built from a known good version for the local architecture using the yarn task:
yarn build:binaries
Run
yarn start
to start the development server for the frontend. It will serve it on localhost:3000.
Once ready, you can start the electron app with
yarn electron
app: electron appassets: build assets (app icons)dist: app buildspublic: assets that will be added to thebuildfoldersrc: source code
To build a release for the local architecture, run
yarn build:binaries
yarn dist
To cross-compile for MacOS, Windows, Linux, run
yarn build:binaries:mwl
yarn dist -mwl
Thanks for your interest in our project! Feel free to examine our list of potential enhancements on our issues page and help us implement them. Feel free to submit an feature request or bug report yourself as well.
Mainframe wishes to thank the Swarm core team, including Viktor Trón, Louis Holbrook, and Lewis Marshall, as well as the JAAK team, who helped us test the group messaging features for our presentation at Devcon3 on November 4, 2017 in Cancun, Mexico.