TELEMPORIO

A high level description of Telemporio's architecture and software design

In our days, many people have begun to think that it might be a good idea to start protecting their data exposed on the Internet. During the last decade, since the launch of the major social networks, people have openly posted photos and stories of even their most intimate personal lives, and have considered it reasonable and cool. Furthermore, they have chatted through messaging applications offered for free by their favorite social networks, and they never considered whether their private conversations remained private on those platforms that they did not control.

Those days are gone. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, most people have realized how easy it is for AI agents to collect and exploit their data, and that global surveillance is no longer a conspiracy theory, but a harsh legal reality. International law does not protect individuals from AI-powered surveillance, and it's time to start protecting your data.

Telemporio is a software project that arose from the need to protect privacy in online conversations. The core idea is that privacy-conscious individuals would need secure and low-cost tools that will allow them to control their communication infrastructure. The most logical choice for a software product that meets this requirement is a lightweight and secure chat server that can be hosted on a low-end VPS. And this is what Telemporio project has been building since 2020.

Therefore, Telemporio is a secure, self-hosted chat platform that we designed and implemented from scratch on Debian Linux Operating System, with an architecture that emphasizes robust systems engineering, reliable operation, end-to-end security, and easy deployment.

The basic idea is that anyone who decides to use Telemporio will need two things: a domain name and a VPS. The domain name is necessary because a chat server needs a public URL, and the VPS is necessary because the servers must be hosted somewhere in order to be available.

For example, let's say Alice chooses the domain name 'xyz.com' for deploying her Telemporio chat server. After deployment, her public chat address will by convention be https://admin.xyz.com, and she can then share it with her contacts, family members, friends and colleagues; anyone who wants to chat with her must simply open a browser and type this address. In other words, the same way we own a mobile phone number and give it to our contacts so that they can call us, we can own a chat server address and give it to our contacts so that they can initiate chat sessions with us.

Therefore, during basic setup and deployment, the Telemporio chat server is configured with a single subdomain, the admin subdomain, which is always available in every deployment. However, if Telemporio owners wish, they can easily set up additional server instances. Returning to Alice's example, suppose she chats a lot with her mother and father and wants to set up two additional Telemporio server instances that will run alongside her admin instance. She can fo it. She can configure the public addresses of these two additional instances to be https://mama.xyz.com and https://papa.xyz.com. These three server instances, let's call them 'admin', 'papa', and 'mama' instances, will be completely independent Linux server processes with their own memory space, database, etc, but they will be interconnected in a mesh with each other, that is, they will be federated. Every time Alice logs in, she will be able to see if her mother or father has also logged in and she will be able to start a chat with them.

From what we've described, Alice has actually begun building her own private social network on a low-cost infrastructure that she controls herself. This is the core idea behind Telemporio. Now, let's delve deeper into the implementation and look at more details. Already during the early design phase of Telemporio's implementation, we decided to implement three features for enhanced privacy and security.

First, all conversations would be end-to-end encrypted by default. In practice, end-to-end encryption means that all conversations are encrypted by default and that the encryption keys would never leave the browser environment. In terms of security, this means that even if a server were compromised, the attacker would only find encrypted messages in there, messages that would be impossible to decrypt and read because the decryption keys would not be present.

Second, all server operations would be ephemeral and performed solely in RAM, meaning that the exchanged encrypted messages would not be stored on disk or in any database. This implies that, in Telemporio, conversations exist only while they are taking place, and as soon as someone ends the chat session or closes the browser, all messaging data disappear from the system and cannot be recovered.

And third, we would not use cookies for HTTP session management. This means no more annoying browser pop-ups asking us to accept the use of cookies, etc.

Given the requirement that Telemporio would be hosted and run on the most basic VPS nodes available, and that each VPS would need to start and manage multiple user process servers in parallel, the server process had to be as lightweight as possible in terms of its system resource requirements, i.e., CPU and RAM. For this reason, we decided to build the server using the very low-level C programming language in order to control every aspect of system resource utilization and achieve the necessary performance optimizations.

Furthermore, we wanted to reuse a significant portion of the system's data structures and improve the speed and performance of the web client as well. Therefore, we decided to develop the client using WebAssembly, compiled from the same C code that would run on the server. The fact that both the server and client would ran the same efficient and ultra-fast C code made the design a unique and stimulating challenge. The server and web client would communicate asynchronously using secure WebSockets and cooperate seamlessly in order to establish secure, end-to-end encrypted chat sessions between independent Telemporio users, who would use their own servers and identify themselves with a pseudonymous subdomain identity.