My final project for CS50W 2020 is called CipherChat. CipherChat is an end-to-end encrypted real-time chat service that runs on Django, Django Channels, and Redis 5. Views.py contains all of my HTTP views for my webpage, and urls.py contains all my HTTP urls. Routing.py and Consumers.py configure Django Channels, which I am using to acheive real-time communication on my website. My static folder contains application.js, the JavaScript that I use to connect to the chat server and perform dynamic actions. The encryption directory contains the source code of Cryptico, the JavaScript package I am using in order to create a secure RSA-1024 encrypted chat. Cryptico's GitHub repo is here. After two months of nonstop work, I have finally created this project, and I hope you enjoy it.
Since CipherChat does not run on pure Django, you must take some extra steps for setup. First, you must install all the requirements running:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Then, you must download and run a Redis 5.x+ server. Any older version will not work. For Mac, run:
brew install redis
On Ubuntu, you can install it directly with:
wget https://download.redis.io/releases/redis-6.0.8.tar.gz
tar xzf redis-6.0.8.tar.gz
cd redis-6.0.8
make
Or you can use Its Docker Image with:
docker pull redis
Windows is more difficult, since Redis does not have direct support for Windows. Since I developed this on a Windows machine, I used a Redis alternative, Memurai.
After you install Redis/Memurai, you must run Redis on port 6379 with:
redis-server
On Windows, you can go to Task Manager, go to Services, and activate Memurai.
The you can run CipherChat as you would with any Django application, with
python manage.py runserver
Want to use CipherChat to chat with others? Visit the website, download for Desktop on GitHub releases or download from Google Drive.
This was the old version of CipherChat that was built to only work locally. It did not have support for production servers and ran on SQLite.
CipherChat v1.0 was the official release of CipherChat, with slight speed boosts from CipherChat Pre-Release as well as a database migration from SQLite to PostgreSQL. PgBouncer was also added to prevent the app from crashing from poor Daphne database connection management.
Cipherchat 1.1 vastly sped up the chatting experience in CipherChat by removing all AJAX from messages and transferring messages with pure WebSocket. This sped up CipherChat in browsers such as Opera where AJAX can sometimes be unpredictable. The update also introduced basic Desktop Notifications, where you will be notified of messages in your room when you are not on that tab. Note that the tab must be open in the background. v1.1 used JavaScript URI Encoding to prevent Unicode characters(emojis, Arabic, etc.) from breaking in chat. Since the previous XSS protection was faulty and broke many things like double quotes, the XSS protection was switched from a custom-made script to Handlebars. Previously, message timestamps were always in UTC, so v1.1 used JavaScript to automatically adjust message timestamps to the local timezone on the client.