LeapChat

LeapChat is an ephemeral chat application. LeapChat uses miniLock for challenge/response-based authentication. This app also enables users to create chat rooms, invite others to said rooms (via a special URL with a passphrase at the end of it that is used to generate a miniLock keypair), and of course send (encrypted) messages to the other chat room participants.

Security Features

• The server cannot see anyone's usernames

• Users can "leap" from one room to the next so that if an adversary clicks on an old invite link, it cannot be used to join the room

  • (Feature coming soon!)

• Very secure headers thanks to gosecure.

• TODO (many more)

Instances

There is currently one public instance running at leapchat.org.

Development / Running

Dependencies

If you've yet to install bower and gulp, run

$ npm install -g bower

$ npm install -g gulp

To install Postgres along with the relevant extensions on Debian-based Linux distros, run

$ bash debian_install.sh

On Fedora and friends you can run

$ bash fedora_install.sh

Then, download the latest PostgREST release and put it in your PATH.

Using Docker and Docker compose

Make sure you have Docker installed with Docker Compose. Then run:

$ docker-compose up

This will pull some images from docker-hub and start the following contaiers:

• Postgres at port 5432
• PostgREST at port 3000
• Adminer at port 8081

Adminer is a web UI for managing SQL databases. After the containers are installed and started, go to localhost:8081.

From there you can choose postgres as the database engine and the login with hostname postgres, username and password superuser and database leapchat. In here you can execute the initial scripts for the database. This you only need to do once.

A folder is created at the projects root called _docker-volumes/. This is where all the data from e.g the postgres container are placed. Here the actual database files will be stored.

Once your conatiners are running and you have setup the initial database scripts you can access postgREST at localhost:3000.

If you want to shut down the containers just run:

$ docker-compose down

If you want to force rebuild of the images just run:

$ docker-compose up --build

If you want to remove the containers just run:

$ docker-compose rm

Install and Run

To install and build static assets:

$ npm install

$ mkdir build

$ bower install

$ npm run build

Then, _in another terminal, to set up the database and run PostgREST, which our Go code uses for persistence, run:

$ cd db/

If you're on Linux, now run

$ sudo -u postgres bash init_sql.sh

On Mac OS X, instead run

$ sudo -u $USER bash init_sql.sh

(The following commands should be run regardless of whether you're on Linux or OS X.)

$ postgrest postgrest.conf

Finally, to build the Go binary, then run Go and the Node webserver hosting LeapChat:

$ go build

$ npm run start

Then view http://localhost:8080.

Testing

We use mocha as the testing framework, with chai's expect API.

To run tests:

$ npm test

and go tests:

$ go test [-v] ./...