I’m building Lullwire Relay at ALTRU.dev: an experimental, open-source, end-to-end encrypted messenger designed to run on a relay you control.
No accounts. No phone numbers. No app-store dependency. Your devices handle encryption; your relay stores and forwards sealed messages. Host it on a VPS, Raspberry Pi, spare Android phone or, for messaging-only deployments, ordinary PHP shared hosting.
The current 0.6.0 development snapshot brings together:
• Session security: signed prekeys and a Double Ratchet, plus signed address cards designed to prevent mailbox substitution in invitations and handle address changes safely.
• Private delivery: sealed-sender envelopes, padded message sizes, optional cover traffic, invite-only relays and private-path hosting.
• Encrypted local storage: messages, contacts and key material are encrypted on-device. Android uses the Keystore; an optional app lock is available elsewhere. New accounts use eight recovery words.
• Encrypted voice and video: one-to-one calls travel through the relay over HTTPS/WebSocket, using fresh per-call keys. There is no peer-to-peer connection exposing callers’ IP addresses to each other.
• Android background delivery: messages and call notifications work without Google services or a third-party push server. The same core app is also an installable web app.
• Signed web updates: installed web apps verify release signatures before accepting updates, helping reject forged, unsigned or rolled-back code.
The Go relay is a self-contained binary built with the Go standard library. A lightweight PHP relay remains available for basic messaging. Setup guidance covers VPS, Tor, tunnels, Android/Termux and shared hosting.
A note on security: Lullwire Relay is experimental and has not received an independent professional cryptographic audit. It has undergone internal adversarial review and regression testing, but that is not a substitute for independent review. The relay can still see connection metadata, and known limitations are documented. It is not positioned as a replacement for Signal or SimpleX in high-risk situations.
The goal is to make self-hosted private communication more approachable, inspectable and practical—without pretending privacy software is finished just because it works.
I welcome technical feedback, testing and independent security review.
Explore the project: https://lnkd.in/g5aRkPtk
Lullwire Relay — private communication, on infrastructure you control.
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