Server and relay
Ciphertext in, ciphertext out.
Every message, file, note and photo is sealed on your phone before it leaves. Our relay moves sealed envelopes and nothing else. We own the server, and we still can't read what's on it.
Three separated parts
Compromise one, and you don't get the others
Your phone
All encryption and decryption happens here. Keys live in memory or the phone's secure storage and never travel to the server.
The relay
A server Vardum owns and operates. It stores and routes sealed envelopes it cannot open: messages, media and vaults arrive as encrypted blobs.
The identity layer
Accounts and published public keys only, kept apart from message keys. It checks signatures and never sees conversation content.
What the relay holds, and never holds
The relay stores ciphertext. There is no plaintext to hand over.
Holds
- Sealed message envelopes for each thread
- Encrypted media files, each with its own key carried only inside the encrypted message
- Session records needed for delivery, including one disclosed plaintext field: the thread nickname, deleted with the thread
- Your published public identity keys
- The read receipts a receiver chooses to send back
Never holds
- Message content or content keys
- Your private keys
- Your contacts
- Your 24 words, which are never sent at all
- Your app password
- Any plaintext of anything you said, sent or stored
Blinded by design
A uniform stream of sealed blobs
Fixed-size padding, decoy envelopes on a jittered schedule, and per-message sender tags that can't be linked across ratchet steps. To the relay, and anyone watching it, traffic has no readable shape and no stable sender. (MSG-05, OPS-04)
Deleted like it was never there
Two clocks, an X, and a sweep
Opened messages burn on the clock you chose, timed from when the person opens them. Unopened copies expire on their own clock. Quiet threads delete themselves. The X in any chat destroys the ciphertext and the session record from either side, at any time. A two-minute sweep clears whatever has expired. And the duress password deletes the relay's records of you in the same moment it wipes your phone. (MSG-04, OPS-01, OPS-03, APP-02)
What a lawful search finds
Comply fully, and there's nothing to extract
No message history, no content keys, no contact list. The phone holds ciphertext or nothing at all; the relay holds ciphertext we can't open. The privacy policy and who can see what set this out in full.
The relay masks what travels inside a conversation: size, timing and sender. It can't mask the connection itself. The relay, and anyone watching it, can still see that a phone connected, when, from which address, and how much traffic moved. It also holds session records, routing metadata and the thread nickname, and media files have a visible size. None of this is a no-metadata or no-logs claim. (NC-03)