Box: Transport Agnostic Protocol for Encrypted Communication

In this lecture, we went over a draft version of an encrypted group chat communication protocol that was named Box. We went over the different concepts of the protocol, such as the cryptographic primitives used, how identities work, how our “passphrase identities” works, and how we designed the protocol itself.

We later renamed the Box protocol to Celo, but we never finished the protocol, and the specification remains a draft. George Kadianakis published a simplified version of the protocol named Flute together with a Python implementation and a WeeChat plug-in. George has published his Flute project at Github.

The concept of “passphrase identities” was later lifted out of the specification and turned into a separate tool to generate OpenSSH and OpenPGP keys using passphrases as seed material. The source for the passphrase-identity tool is available at Github.