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---
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# Cwtch Intro
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# What is Cwtch?
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Cwtch (/kʊtʃ/ - a Welsh word roughly translating to “a hug that creates a safe place”) is a decentralized, privacy-preserving, metadata resistant messaging app.
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* **Decentralized and Open**: There is no “Cwtch service” or “Cwtch network”. Participants in Cwtch can host their own safe spaces, or lend their infrastructure to others seeking a safe space. The Cwtch protocol is open, and anyone is free to build bots, services and user interfaces and integrate and interact with Cwtch.
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* **Privacy Preserving**: All communication in Cwtch is end-to-end encrypted and takes place over Tor v3 onion services.
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* **Metadata Resistant**: Cwtch has been designed such that no information is exchanged or available to anyone without their explicit consent, including on-the-wire messages and protocol metadata.
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** See also: [Create a profile](/docs/profiles/create-a-profile)**
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# Security, Encryption and Safety
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## Identity, or What exactly is a Cwtch Profile?
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With Cwtch you can create one of more **Profiles**. Each profile generates a random ed25519 keypair compatible with
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the Tor Network.
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This is the identifier that you can give out to people and that they can use to contact you via Cwtch
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## Peer to Peer, 2-party Conversions
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![](/img/BASE_3.png)
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In order to chat with your friends in a peer-to-peer conversation both must be online.
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After a successful connection both parties engage in an **authentication protocol** which:
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* Asserts that each party has access to the private key associated with their public identity.
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* Generates an ephemeral session key used to encrypt all further communication during the session.
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This exchange (documented in further detail in [authentication protocol](https://docs.openprivacy.ca/cwtch-security-handbook/authentication_protocol.html)) is *offline deniable*
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i.e. it is possible for any party to forge transcripts of this protocol exchange after the fact, and as such - after the
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fact - it is impossible to definitely prove that the exchange happened at all.
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One the authentication process is successful then both you and your friend can communicate away assured that no one else
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can learn anything about the contents or the metadata if your conversation.
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## Offline Delivery via Untrusted Routing Servers, and Group Conversations
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**Note: Metadata Resistant Group Communication is still an active research area and what is documented here
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will likely change in the future.**
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In order to get around the limitation of being always-online, Cwtch has built in support for hosting
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conversations on **Untrusted Servers**.
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These servers can be set up by anyone and are intended to be always online. Most importantly, all communication with a
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server is designed such that the server learns as little information as possible about the contents or metadata.
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The risk model associated with servers is more complicated that peer-to-peer communication, as such we currently
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require people who want to use servers within cwtch to [opt-in to the Group Chat experiment](/docs/groups/enable-experiment)
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in order to add, manage and create groups on untrusted servers.
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Cwtch (/kʊtʃ/ - a Welsh word roughly translating to “a hug that creates a safe place”) is a decentralized, privacy-preserving, metadata resistant messenging app.
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## Getting Started
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### Install
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Install on OS of choice:
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- Android
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- MacOS
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- Linux
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### Use
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**[Create a profile](/docs/profiles/create-a-profile)**
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