Kaidan
It’s finally there: Kaidan with end-to-end encryption via OMEMO 2, Automatic Trust Management and support of XMPP Providers! Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Zero PET and NGI Assure with public money provided by the European Commission. We would also like to thank Radically Open Security (especially Christian Reitter) for a quick security evaluation during the NGI Zero project.
Even if Kaidan is making good progress, please keep in mind that it is not yet a stable app. Do not expect it to work well on all supported systems. Moreover, we do currently not consider Kaidan’s security as good as the security of the dominating chat apps.
There is a new overview of features Kaidan supports. Have a look at that or at the changelog for more details.
Encryption
All messages sent by Kaidan can be encrypted now. If a contact supports the same encryption, Kaidan enables it by default. Therefore, you do not have to enable it by yourself. And you will also never need to worry about enabling it for new contacts. But it is possible to disable it for each contact at any time.
Additionally, all metadata that is encryptable, such as typing notifications, is encrypted too. The new Automatic Trust Management (ATM) makes trust management easier than before. The details are explained in a previous post.
We worked hard on covering as many corner cases as possible. Encrypted sessions are initialized in the background to reduce the loading time. Kaidan even tries to repair sessions broken by other chat apps. But if you discover any strange behavior, please let us know!
We decided to focus on future technologies. Thus, Kaidan does not support OMEMO versions older than 0.8.1. Unfortunately, many other clients do not support the latest version yet. They only encrypt the body (text content) of a message, which is not compatible with newer OMEMO versions and ATM. But we hope that other client developers will follow our lead soon.
XMPP Providers
Kaidan introduced an easy registration in version 0.5. It used an own list of XMPP providers since then. The new project XMPP Providers arose from that approach. That project is intended to be used by various applications and services.
Kaidan is now one of them. It uses XMPP Providers for its registration process instead of maintaining an own list of providers. Try it out and see how easy it can be to get an XMPP account with Kaidan!
Changelog
This release adds the following features:
- End-to-end encryption with OMEMO 2 for messages, files and metadata including an easy trust management
- XMPP Providers support for an easy onboarding
- Message reactions for sending emojis upon a message
- Read markers showing which messages a contact has read
- Message drafts to send entered messages later after switching chats or restarting Kaidan
- Message search for messages that are not yet loaded
- New look of the chat background and message bubbles including grouped messages from the same author
- Chat pinning for reordering chats
- Public group chat search (without group chat support yet)
- New contact and account details including the ability to change the own profile picture
- Restored window position on start
Download
- Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 4663231A91A1E27B)
- Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)
Or install Kaidan from your distribution:
KDE