Is it possible to deliver offline messages using a P2P network on iOS/Android?
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I’m working on secure and anonymous instant messenger for Android and iOS. I believe that true security and anonymity can’t be achieved in client-server architecture, therefore I’m building up a P2P mobile IM without servers or “super†nodes. I have opted out of XMPP in favor of Torchat. So at this point my team is porting https://code.google.com/p/torchat/ and https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ to iOS and Android. Source code is open on https://github.com/prive. Torchat and OTR solve my objectives perfectly well — it provide security, lack of central nodes and servers, IP address masking, ease of use, reliable connectivity, encryption and authentication. But neither of them work if recipient of the message is offline. Message is lost and recipient never receives it when becomes online. My assumption is that messages should be buffered inside P2P network and conveyed to users by mediators, other participants of the network. I looked over the Internet and found a http://bitmessage.org/ protocol. It’s based on Bitcoin protocol and implements P2P serverless instant messaging. Each node in Bitmessage network receives all messages and attempts to decrypt them using own private key. To solve scalability issues network is split automatically into multiple clusters (called streams). It allows to keep network traffic and CPU consumption within acceptable threshold. Am I using the right protocol to implement P2P offline messaging on iOS/Android? Can I estimate network and CPU load that will occur on mobile device? Is it possible to receive and decrypt Bitmessage data on iOS while application is in background?
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Answer:
Your needs are extremely high, almost idealistic. If people are actually interested, they will keep their phones online to receive these messages.
Hunter R Peress at Quora Visit the source
Other answers
The easiest solution would be to keep messages on sender until recipient gets online. This tends to be more secure than buffering someone's messages on intermediary (server or peer). That's how we handled it on our p2p messenger for iOS.
Serg Cherkasky
I don't see how what he is proposing is that idealistic. Having people keep a device online at all times to retrieve messages is unrealistic. Even when you have text messages if you turn your phone off when you turn it back on they sync up with the server. Bitmessage is a good way to ensure that users can be offline and then retrieve messages at a later time. Implementing on a mobile device though may be problematic due to the proof of work necessary to send the messages.
Brian Hoffman
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