Vortex: Secure, Transport-Agnostic, E2EE Chat in Under 600 Lines

Warning

This is a proof of concept, it was not audited!

Vortex is a lightweight, end-to-end encrypted chat application that ensures message authenticity and confidentiality. It offers transport agnosticism, supporting both PostgreSQL and WebSocket, all in less than 600 lines of Python code.

Setup and Usage

1. Clone the repository or download requirements.txt and vortex.py to an empty directory.
2. Install python dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Generate your public/private key pair:

   ./vortex.py --generate-keys

4. Share your public key (id_rsa.pub) with your contacts and ask them to share theirs with you.
5. Put your contacts' public keys in the known_users file. E.g.:

   # Work contacts:
   ssh-rsa <public key> John
   ssh-rsa <public key> Ofélia HR
   
   # Family:
   ssh-rsa <public key> Mother
   ssh-rsa <public key> Father
   ssh-rsa <public key> Joana
   

6. Optionally, add rooms to the known_rooms file. E.g.:

   # Work:
   Jonh, Ofélia HR
   
   # Family:
   Joana, Mother, Father
   

7. Run:

   ./vortex.py <connection-uri>

   Where <connection-uri> is either a PostgreSQL connection string or a WebSocket: postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/vortex, ws://localhost:8080, wss://localhost:8080.

Setup Server

Create a database like the specified on postgres-setup.sql if you want to use PostgreSQL, or, to start a WebSocket server run:

./websocket-server.py