This is Part 1 in a series of articles on Whisper, Ehtereum’s inter-application communication protocol. In this article, we cover the principles and use cases of Whisper. We will dive into practical examples in Part 2, and share some tricks we have learned from using Whisper in a decentralized exchange project we have been working on.

Messaging: One of the three basic needs of Decentralized Applications

Non-trivial applications often require three kinds of resources to provide services, namely, Compute, Storage, and Messaging. Created with the grand vision of building a global decentralized computing platform, Ethereum serves these basic needs with three pieces of foundational technologies: the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) provides compute, Swarm handles storage of large files, and Whisper is the answer to messaging.

Credit: Vitalik Buterin

In a nutshell, Whisper is a peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging protocol for decentralized applications (Dapps) to provide Dapp developers a simple API to send and receive messages in almost complete secrecy. This devotion to secrecy forces the designers of Whisper to make some interesting trade-offs to sacrifice performance for privacy. As a result, Whisper is more suitable to certain class of use cases.

Use Cases for Whisper

What Whisper is good for

Publish-subscribe coordination signaling. Dapps could collaborate with one another by implementing the pubsub pattern with Whisper.

Dapps could collaborate with one another by implementing the pubsub pattern with Whisper. Secure, untraceable communication. Whisper is designed from the ground up to support highly private and secure communication with plausible deniability.

What Whisper isn’t good for

Ultra low latency/real-time communication. Whisper messages may be routed in a probabilistic way, making it difficult to guarantee latency for time-sensitive applications.

Whisper messages may be routed in a probabilistic way, making it difficult to guarantee latency for time-sensitive applications. Sending large data chunks. Whisper is best used for messages less than 64KB in size. For larger messages, another channel designed for content distribution such as swarm may be a better choice.

Whisper Fundamentals

Whisper is a configurable messaging protocol that gives dapp developers a lot of flexibility in controlling the security and privacy parameters of their messages. To fully take advantage of Whisper, it is necessary to understand, at least at a high level, how Whisper works.

A network of equal peers

The Whisper network is made up systems called nodes that are connected in a decentralized way. To establish this network, a node finds its peers in the network using the ÐΞVp2p protocol. ÐΞVp2p is a significant piece of technology in the Ethereum ecosystem, as it provides the foundation for which the protocols in the Ethereum stack are built. Although they share the same wire protocol, Whisper and its sister protocols Ethereum and Swarm do not interoperate. The fact that Ethereum and Whisper nodes tend to runs on the same implementation is simply a coincidence driven by convenience.

Identity-driven communication

Once a node has been connected to Whisper, a Dapp instance can start receiving messages by establishing an identity in that node. An identity is not strictly necessary to send messages, although it is needed to establish two-way communications. This gives raise to interesting use cases and challenges.

Broadly speaking, an identity in Whisper is an entity (an individual or a group) that consumes messages. In practice, an identity can be thought of as a holder of an encryption key. To receive Whisper messages, therefore, it is necessary to create an encryption key. Both symmetric (AES-256) and asymmetric (secp256k1) keys are supported for different use cases.

Encryption ensures that only the intended recipient(s) can access the content of a piece of message. If a node can decrypt a piece of message, then the message is intended for a recipient using that node.

Delivering Messages in Darkness

Whisper touts itself as being able to communicate in darkness. This means that two nodes in a Whisper network can communicate without leaving any traceable evidence to traffic analyzers and other peers, even if those peers participated in the message routing. This is achieved by trading performance for privacy.

To achieve total darkness in communication, two basic criteria must be satisfied: the content of the message is inaccessible to those who intercepts the messages, and that communicating nodes cannot be easily identified. The protection of the messages is achieved by Whisper taking an encryption-first approach to messaging; it is impossible to send unencrypted messages through Whisper. To hide the fact that two nodes are talking to each other, routing information must also be hidden. But how?

Messages are addressed to no one

To send a piece of message, the sending Dapp makes an API call to its Whisper node to encrypt the message using a shared symmetric key or the recipient’s public key and seal the encrypted message inside an envelope. Like its real world counterpart, a Whisper envelope contains metadata to help it get routed to its final destination and processed.

Unlike real world envelopes, Whisper envelopes do not contain any information about its recipient. A typical Whisper envelope has the following format:

[ Version, Expiry, TTL, Topic, AESNonce, Data, EnvNonce ]

The only piece of information interesting to an attack would be the content of the data field, but that holds the encrypted data.

It makes sense as a part of the dark communication strategy that the recipient of a piece of message cannot be readily identified. Without such a crucial piece of information, the only possible strategy to have any hope for the message to reach its intended recipient is to send the message to every node.

Routing in the blind

Whisper defeats traffic analysis by having each Whisper message routed to every node in the network. In this sense, Whisper behaves like the user datagram protocol (UDP) operating in broadcast mode. Since every node receives a copy of the same message, it is impossible to tell which recipient the sender is trying to communicate with.

Although it is difficult to tell which recipient a message is addressed to, a powerful adversary may still be able to determine if two nodes are communicating if they are able to control all but the two communicating nodes. In this scenario, if node A sends a message to node B, the adversary will be able to discern that communication took place between the pair. Such an attack can be defeated by introducing noise into the network by having well-behaved nodes sending junk messages encrypted with a random key into the network.

Probabilistic message filtering

In order for a node to decide if a piece of message is intended for an identity using its service, it needs to be able to decrypt the message. Since the envelope contains no metadata on the intended recipient, a node must try every key it holds before it can determine whether a piece of message is sent to its users. Decryption is expensive work! Compounded with the fact that a node will receive every piece of message of the network, it is infeasible to decrypt every piece of incoming messages in most practical applications.

This problem is solved by requiring each message to be associated with a topic. An identity registers the topics it’s interested in by using its encryption key to create a message filter on a node. This efficient probabilistic filter, known as a bloom filter, can tell to a very high degree of certainty (false-positives are possible) if a piece of message belongs to a topic of interest.

A node will only attempt decryption if a filter signals a possible match.

Quality of Service Assurance

With every Whisper message being delivered to every reachable node, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Whisper is susceptible to denial of service (DoS) attacks. An attack can be launched in at least two ways:

Flood Attack: Repeatedly send messages into the network Expiry Attack: Make messages hang around for a long time by setting a long TTL (Time-to-Live) on the envelope

Flood attack is prevented by the Whisper node and the message filters requiring the sender to perform proof-of-work (PoW) computation and including the result as the EnvNonce field in the message envelope. A node may refuse to accept a piece of message if the PoW is too low. Message filters may opt for more stringent PoW requirement than the node requires.

Expiry attack is prevented by a message rating system that takes PoW, message size, and TTL into account to compute a message rating. The criteria of the rating is rather simple:

Smaller messages have higher ratings Messages with higher PoW have higher ratings Messages with lower TTL have higher ratings

The rating of a piece of message affects both its forwarding priority and how long it will be stored in the system. It is therefore in the interest of the sender to make sure the messaging rating is as high as necessary to achieve its objective. For example,when a node’s message pool approaches its memory limit, the node may clean up messages that it consider to be of low rating. This rating system limits the impact of a DoS attack.

Barriers to Wider Adoption

As great as Whisper is, the actual uptake of Whisper is somewhat low. This is partly due to the design choices of Whisper, and partly because of alternative messaging option from within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Key Management

Whisper currently relies on Whisper nodes holding on to users’ secret key, so that messages intended for the users can be decrypted. This mode of operation rules out being able to use “zero client” providers such as Infura, one of the most popular Ethereum infrastructure services, which operate on the principle that wallet software like MetaMask should be responsible for key management.

This limitation can be mitigated by having Whisper nodes running alongside the wallet software on the user’s device. For example, trading application developed in Electron can implement Whisper for order signaling and interoperate with regular Whisper nodes. There are some exciting developments in this space led by Guillaume Ballet, which lay the foundation for alternative Whisper implementations that operate on protocols other than TCP and UDP that ÐΞVp2p requires to talk to regular Whisper nodes backed by Go Ethereum (Geth) or Parity.

Disabled by Default

Currently, Whisper is an opt-in service. To use it, one needs to enable to it at the command line. As a result, Whisper is not running on the majority of Ethereum nodes. This conscious decision to have Whisper disabled by default is a sensible one, however, as Whisper is still an experimental protocol.

Whisper’s Sibling: Postal Services Over Swarm

In July 2017, a new messaging protocol called Postal Services over Swarm (PSS) was introduced. On the surface, it looks a lot like Whisper but with a different set of trade-offs, such as having deterministic routing (trading privacy for performance). Unlike Whisper, which is included with Geth and Parity, PSS requires a separate Swarm client to operate in a swarm cluster.

While PSS may not be in direction competition with Whisper, having PSS in the mix may dilute interest and resources available to further the development of Whisper. On the other hand, PSS may explore alternative solution to the key management problem that is affecting Whisper at the moment.

In short, PSS represents both a threat and an opportunity to Whisper. Either way, we as developers benefit from having more options when it comes to messaging.

Current Status & Adoption

Whisper is a young, proof-of-concept protocol, but it has already found its way into production use. Status, an interesting Ethereum client project, uses Whisper to implement chat, and is probably the biggest production Whisper user at the moment.

We at Enuma Technologies are also making use of Whisper for the OAX project for order signaling.

The latest version of Whisper is V6. Prior versions of Whisper (V2-V5) have now reached end-of-life and are unsupported.

Conclusion

Whisper is a simple, privacy-first, low-level messaging protocol for decentralized applications built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. The solution shows a lot of promise, and enjoys being tightly integrated with prominent Ethereum clients such as Go Ethereum and Parity.

We looked some of the obstacles the young protocol faces, and what the community is doing to address some them.

With a small but vibrant community behind Whisper, it is a messaging solution worth looking at for decentralized applications.

Author

David Leung

References