Future Of Secure Messaging: Why Decentralization Matters More Than...

Apps like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal made end-to-end encryption (E2EE) a default expectation. But most still hinge on phone numbers, centralized servers and a lot of metadata, such as who you talk to, when, from which IP and on which device.

Session is a good case study because it tries to combine E2E encryption with decentralization. There is no central message server, traffic is routed through onion paths, and user IDs are keys instead of phone numbers.

Did you know? Forty-three percent of people who use public WiFi report experiencing a data breach, with man-in-the-middle attacks and packet sniffing against unencrypted traffic among the most common causes.

Session is built around public key identities. When you sign up, the app generates a keypair locally and derives a Session ID from it with no phone number or email required.

Messages travel through a network of service nodes using onion routing so that no single node can see both the sender and the recipient. (You can see your message’s node path in the settings.) For asynchronous delivery when you are offline, messages are stored in small groups of nodes called “swarms.” Each Session ID is mapped to a specific swarm, and your messages are stored there encrypted until your client fetches them.

Historically, messages had a default time-to-live of about two weeks in the swarm. After that the network copy is gone, and only what is on your devices remains.

And yes, Session keeps a local database of your chats and attachments so you can scroll back months or years. That is why the app download might be around 60 to 80 MB, but the installed size grows as you send media, cache thumbnails and maintain chat history. Public documentation and independent reviews have described this split between short-lived network storage and long-lived local storage.

You can trim this by deleting chats, using disappearing messages or clearing media. If you can still see it, it lives somewhere on your device.

Slow Mode is background polling. The app wakes up periodically and checks for new messages over its own network. It is more private but can be delayed or unreliable, especially if your OS is aggressive about background activity.

Fast Mode uses push notifications. Session uses Apple Push Notification Service on iOS and a similar approach on Android to deliver timely alerts.

Source: CoinTelegraph