portals 0.0.6

Portals are strongly encrypted peer-to-peer connections. Inspired by Magic Wormhole.

Portals are strongly encrypted peer-to-peer connections. Inspired by Magic Wormhole.

Welcome to the portals package! "With it, you can create your own portals. These intra-dimensional gates have proven to be completely safe." ~ GLaDOS

TODO: Flutter web & app demo

⚠️ This package is still in technical preview. The API may change substantially in the future and it's not safe to use this package in production yet – several features like reconnecting when the network is lost, or using a transfer server if the two devices can't see each other still need to be implemented.

Features

❤️ Easy to use: Portals connect by letting users transcribe short human-readable codes from one device to another. TODO: There's a beautiful pre-built UI for Flutter.

🔒 Secure: Strong end-to-end encryption using Spake2 is built in. Man-in-the-middle attacks are virtually impossible because both sides share a secret from the beginning.

⚡ Fast: Data is transferred using peer-to-peer connections whenever possible. That makes portals incredibly fast when used on the same wifi or in the same geographic area.

🎈 Lightweight: There are no native dependencies. That also means, portals work anywhere where Dart runs: on mobile, desktop & the web. Portals use lightweight WebSockets to communicate.

How to use

To connect two devices, you need to create a portal on each of them.

var portal = Portal(appId: 'my.app.example.com');

On the first device, open the portal. It will return a phrase that uniquely identifies it:

String phrase = await portal.open();
// TODO: Show the phrase to the user.
String key = await portal.waitForLink();

Let the user transcribes the phrase to the second user in the real world. The second user can then link the two portals:

// TODO: Let the user enter the phrase.
String key = await portal.openAndLinkTo(phrase);

Now the two portals are linked. Optionally, you can let the users compare the key to completely rule out man-in-the-middle attacks.

In the background, both clients try to establish a peer-to-peer connection to each other. Wait for it on both sides by calling:

await portal.waitUntilReady();

Now, anything that goes into one of the two portals comes out the other.

portal.add(something);
var somethingElse = await portal.receive();

Send objects

TODO

How it works

TODO

How it relates to magic wormhole

TODO