peerjs-multichat

Secure, persistent, almost serverless, one-page real-time chat proof-of-concept, built in under 3 hours using WebRTC, PeerJS, Vue and javascript cookies!

Use this project to securely chat with your friends, in real-time.

Installation

Simply download index.html and open it with a decent (javascript-enabled) recent browser!

The challenge

Today's internet infrastructures rely almost every time on data centers, which have a cost and an environmental impact. To be more specific, data centers are responsible for approx. 4% of the world's energy consumption (and growing). But how would you do your day without your daily binge-watching on demand?

The goal of this project is to simplify and demonstrate the power, security and persistency of serverless data exchanges. Here is the complete list of features:

Basic chat application with usernames
Any user must be able to join any other user (in chat rooms)
Security: data exchanges must be encrypted
Persistency: data must be saved throught sessions (username, chat)
Serverless: data must be exchanged between peers without the need of a server
Simplicity: anyone must be able to use this project without knowledge of anything

The solution

I've designed the most simple solution to fulfill the previous requirements, using:

WebRTC, for secure, reliable and serverless data exchanges
Vue.js, for fast & light-weight dynamic rendering & state management
PeerJS, for development simplicity over WebRTC
MaterializeCSS, for fast & modern design
JavaScript localStorage, for data persistency

WebRTC is the Google's open-source base for peer communication in-the-browser, using QUIC protocol (the most recent, fast & reliable transport layer network protocol). It's supported by almost every decent browser and provides a way to establish data channels between peers supporting any type of data, including real-time audio and video.

PeerJS provides a way to conect the client the a server's endpoint, waiting for peer connections from other clients. Once a connection's established, both peers communicate over WebRTC data channels from which only them can read/write.

Why is this solution a great proof of concept?

The strength of this solution is in its simplicity and security:

Any user can log in with a username and join any other friend it knows
Any user has a complete access to its chat history
Data exchanges are fully encrypted and cannot be interpreted by a man-in-the-middle (see A Study of WebRTC Security for more information)

Why is this solution only a proof of concept?

Many aspects are still to be discussed and thought again:

You wouldn't use an application which stores data as javascript cookies!
A server is still needed to establish a peer connection (see WebRTC: the ICE Framework, STUN and TURN Servers to learn more about the why). In our case, we use a high-level PeerJS signaling server by default, in comparison with a low-level STUN server (which we could use, with more low-level code)
Data exchanged is only read and written by peers, which is why this solution is not suitable for exchanging (for example) gaming data (any user could cheat!)

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