Roadmap & Research

TrueSeal is a Developer Preview. It delivers end-to-end encrypted messages between the devices of a group, through a relay that can’t read or forge them. What 1.0 needs is a commitment. The research direction after it is only an intent, and I’d rather keep the two apart.

1.0

TrueSeal reaches 1.0 when four fixed criteria hold, and it has no target date. Developer preview lists the criteria and what 1.0 doesn’t require.

Research direction

Today every member of a group receives every message. The direction I want to explore is a device receiving only the messages it holds a capability for.

The addressed encryption TrueSeal already uses points at how. A message is sealed to a public key, and only the holder of the private key can open it. If a message could be sealed to a key for one object or one topic instead of a device, holding that key would be the permission to read it, and no server would decide who gets what.

Sealing to such a key is the easy part. The open question is how a device gets a new key of that kind without a full pairing and without someone in the middle handing keys out, while the relay still learns nothing new. Pairing hands out keys for a whole device. I don’t know yet how to do it per object or per topic, and I’m not promising that it will ship.