The 9th week of GSoC is there. I’m surprised of how fast time went by, but I guess that happens when you enjoy what you do 🙂

I’m happy to report that the third iteration of my Jingle code is working again. There are still many bugs and Socks5Transport is still missing, but all in all I’m really happy with how it turned out. Next I’ll make the implementation more solid and add more features like transport replacing etc.

Apart from normal Jingle File Transfer I also started working on my JET protocol. JET is short for Jingle Encrypted Transfers which is my approach to combining Jingle sessions with end-to-end encryption. My focus lays on modularity and easy extensibility. Roughly JET works as follows:

Lets assume, Alice wants to send an encrypted file to Bob. Luckily Alice and Bob already do have a secure OMEMO session. Alice now sends a JET File transfer request to Bob, which includes a security element which contains an OMEMO key transport message. Bob can decrypt the key transport message with his OMEMO session to retrieve an AES key. That key will be used to encrypt/decrypt the file Alice sends to Bob as soon as the jingle session negotiation is finished.

This protocol should in theory work with any end-to-end encryption method, for example also with OpenPGP. Also JET is in theory not limited to file transfer, but could also be used to secure other types of Jingle sessions, eg. Audio/Video calls. Since the development is in a very early state, it would be nice to get some feedback from more experienced developers and members of the XMPP community. A rendered version of the JET specification can be found here.

I’m very happy that encrypted File transfer already works in my implementation. I created an integration test for that, which transports the encryption key using OMEMO. Apropos tests: I created a basic JingleTransport test, which tests transport methods. Currently SOCKS5 is still failing, but I’m very close to a solution.

During the week I opened another PR against the XEPs repo, which adds a missing attribute to a XML schema in the Jingle File Transfer XEP.