Bugoff

A Gun DB extension that ships secure* ephemeral messaging between Gun peers using Bugout, secured by Gun's SEA suite

About

Bugoff creates an SEA encryption pair for every Bugout connection, encrypts each message with a shared secret, then decrypts those messages received by the recipient peer(s). It supports and encrypts direct (peer-to-peer) and broadcast (one-to-many) messages.

Gun peers typically communicate messages with each other by listening for graph change events. That means those messages generally must be stored somewhere on the graph before a peer receives a message about it. Bugoff glues together Gun and Bugout (a decentralized messaging library based on WebRTC/WebTorrent) to provide ephemeral messaging between peers that does not need to -- but may -- be stored in a Gun DB graph.

Bugoff peers connect to each other through Bugout, which is a WebTorrent extension that swarms peers together based on an infohash shared to the WebTorrent network. The infohash represents a torrent containing the swarm name. Since this is clear text in the torrent, Bugoff abstracts that name away with a SHA256 hash. This way, only those who know the SHA256 hash can join the Bugoff swarm. A way to secure the swarm further could be to pass in a Gun user's public SEA key as the swarm identifier.

Status

*Bugoff is in an experimental state. Some intended features and functionality may not yet work correctly. Please use with care!

Install

> npm i bugoff

Example

const { SEA } = require('gun')
const Bugoff = require('bugoff')

;(async ()=>{
  let bugoff = new Bugoff('some unique swarm identifier')

  // Return this Bugoff swarm/room identifier
  console.log('Bugoff swarm ID:', bugoff.identifier)

  console.log('My address:', bugoff.address)
  // You may pass in your own Gun SEA pair
  bugoff.SEA(await SEA.pair())
  
  // Or let Bugoff generate a new SEA pair for you (this happens automatically)
  await bugoff.SEA()

  // Return the current SEA pair
  console.log(await bugoff.sea)

  bugoff.on('seen', address => {
    console.log('Seen!', address)
    // Broadcast message
    bugoff.send('Broadcast message test')
    // Direct message
    bugoff.send(address, 'Direct message test')
  })

  // Decrypted messages
  bugoff.on('decrypted', (address, pubkeys, message) => {
    console.log('From address:', address)
    console.log('Sender pubkeys:', pubkeys)
    console.log('Message:', message)
  })

  // Encrypted messages. May be useful for debugging.
  bugoff.on('message', (address, data) => console.log('From:', address, 'Received message!', data))

})()

API

Bugoff follows the Bugout API, with this primary exception:

1. Every message is encrypted using the Gun SEA suite, so the bugoff.on() and bugoff.once() methods require a new listener for decryption: bugoff.on('decrypted', (address, pubkeys, message)) & bugoff.once('decrypted', (address, pubkeys, message))

Bugoff will be further expanded / tested for Gun chaining methods in later versions.

Properties

bugoff.identifier

Returns the Bugoff swarm identifier, a SHA256 hash of the identifier that is passed in to create the swarm.

bugoff.address

Returns this instance's Bugoff address. This can be used by other peers to directly send messages to this instance.

bugoff.sea

Return the Gun SEA pair this instance is using.

This is an asychronous call and must be used with await.

Example

console.log('Bugoff swarm ID:', bugoff.identifier)
console.log('My address:', bugoff.address)
console.log('Insance encryption keys:', await bugoff.sea)

Methods

bugoff.SEA([pair])

Generate or pass in a Gun SEA pair. If pair is not specified, Bugoff will generate and use its own pair for this instance.

This is an asychronous call and must be used with await.

Events

'decrypted', (address, pubkeys, message)

Returns decrypted messages on the target Bugoff instance.

Example

bugoff.on('decrypted', (address, pubkeys, message) => {
  console.log('From address:', address)
  console.log('Sender pubkeys:', pubkeys)
  console.log('Message:', message)
})

'message', (address, message)

Returns encrypted messages on the target Bugoff instance. This may be useful for storing encrypted messages somewhere else, or for debugging.

TODO

• Test with browsers. Bugoff should work in the browser with Browserify.
• Extend to Gun as a Gun chain extension.

Contact

All feedback, critique, bug reports are welcome and expected. Please submit an issue, or chat with me about it

MIT licensed