This blogpost doubles as a GSoC update, as well as a version release blog post.
I have the honour to announce the latest release of Smack! Version 4.2 brings among bug fixes and additional features like Explicit Message Encryption (XEP-0380) and Message Processing Hints (XEP-0334) support for OMEMO Multi-End-Message-and-Object encryption (XEP-0384). OMEMO was developed by Andreas Straub for the Conversations messenger (also as a Google Summer of Code project) in 2015. Since then it got quite popular and drew a lot of attention for XMPP in the media. My hope is that my efforts to develop an easy to use Smack module will result in an even broader adoption.
OMEMO is a protocol for multi-end to multi-end encrypted communication, which utilizes the so called Double Ratchet algorithm. It fulfills amongst the basic requirements of encrypted communication (confidentiality, authenticity and integrity) also the properties of deniability and forward secrecy as well as future secrecy. Smacks implementation brings support for encrypted single and group chats including identity management and session renegotiation.
Current implementations (as well as this one) are based upon the libsignal library developed by OpenWhisperSystems for their popular Signal (formerly TextSecure) messenger. Smacks OMEMO support is structured in two modules. There is smack-omemo (APL licensed), which contains the logic specified in the XEP, as well as some basic cryptographic code. The other module smack-omemo-signal (GPLv3 licensed) implements some abstract methods defined by smack-omemo and encapsulates all function calls to libsignal.
Currently smack-omemo-signal is the only module available that implements the double ratchet functionality, but there has been a lot of discussion on the XMPP Standards Foundations mailing list regarding the use of alternative (more permissively licensed) libraries for OMEMO (like for example Olm, a double ratchet implementation from our friends over at the [matrix] project). So once there is a new specification that enables the use of other libraries, it should be pretty easy to write another module for smack-omemo enabling OMEMO support for clients that are not GPLv3 compatible as well.
Smack’s OMEMO modules are my first bigger contribution to a free software project and started as part of my bachelors thesis. I’m quite happy with the outcome 🙂
That was a lot of talking about OMEMO. Now comes the second functioning of this blog post, my GSoC update.
My project of implementing Jingle File Transfer (XEP-0234) for Smack is going relatively well. I’m stuck at some points where there are ambiguities in the XEP or things I don’t know yet, but most of the time I find another construction site where I can continue my work. Currently I’m implementing stanza providers and elements needed for file transfer. Along the way I steadily create Junit tests to keep the code coverage at a high level. Already it pays off when there are fiddly changes in the element structure.
It’s a real pleasure to learn all the tools I never used before like code coverage reports or mocking and I think Flow does a good job introducing me to them one by one.
That’s all for now. Happy hacking 🙂