Ghostly — Encrypted Ephemeral Chat over the DHT \ stacker news

This is pretty clearly vibe-coded, but I'm not sure how big a flag that is anymore. I don't think I'd trust it with anything serious, but the idea seems kinda neat:

Here's how they describe it working:

1. Create a chat. The app generates two Ed25519 keypairs and one 256-bit symmetric encryption key. One keypair is yours to write, the other is for your peer. No server involved.
2. Share a link. The invite URL contains everything your peer needs: their writing seed, your public key, and the shared encryption key — all in the URL fragment, which never leaves the app.
3. Messages travel the DHT. Each message is encrypted with NaCl secretbox, packed into a DNS TXT record, Ed25519-signed, and published to the Mainline DHT via Pkarr. Your peer polls the DHT to receive.
4. Messages expire. Messages are kept alive by periodic republishing. Stop republishing (close the app or delete the chat) and they naturally expire from the DHT in approximately 5 hours.

I could see this being fun to play around with. Here's the github for the project: https://github.com/MiguelMedeiros/ghostly

224 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 15h

Share a link. The invite URL contains everything your peer needs: their writing seed, your public key, and the shared encryption key — all in the URL fragment, which never leaves the app.

this seems a little weird; you send a symmetric encryption key to your peer over some other medium?

the whole point of protocols like Diffie-Hellman is that you can generate a shared secret without ever having the secret leave your device. It's one of the simplest cryptography algorithms, simpler [and older] than RSA.