Ember: A Serverless Peer-to-Peer End-to-End Encrypted Messaging System over an IPv6 Mesh Network
This addresses privacy and security concerns for users needing serverless, encrypted messaging, though it is incremental in combining existing techniques like encryption and mesh networking.
The paper tackles the problem of secure, decentralized communication by introducing Ember, a serverless peer-to-peer messaging system that provides end-to-end encryption over an IPv6 mesh network, with results showing no plaintext recoverable from captured network traffic.
This paper presents Ember, a serverless peer-to-peer messaging system providing end-to-end encrypted communication over a decentralised IPv6 mesh network. Ember operates without central servers, enforces data minimisation through ciphertext-only local storage and time-based message expiration, and prioritises architectural clarity, explicit trust boundaries, and practical deployability on Android. The paper describes the system architecture, cryptographic design, network model, and security properties -- including dynamic testing results demonstrating that no plaintext is recoverable from captured network traffic -- and discusses limitations and future work