How Kreds works
Plain answers, including the limits. If a claim needs an asterisk, the asterisk is right here.
The node
Your node is the app.
A node is a small program on hardware you own — your PC, eventually a box on your shelf. It stores your data, serves your app, and talks directly to your friends' nodes. When you open Kreds, you're looking at your own machine. There is no kreds.eu account, and this website can't see into any of it.
Adding a friend
In person, with one code.
Adding a friend starts in the same room. One of you shows a short code; the other types it in. The code carries your node's address and a one-time secret — it works once, only while you're both online, and dies after ten minutes. Underneath, both devices prove their keys to each other and sign the friendship. Nobody can look you up, and nobody can be added quietly from far away.
Encryption
Encrypted to people, not servers.
Every post and message is encrypted before it leaves your node, separately for each of your friends' devices. A post picks its ring — Kreds (all your friends) or Inner (a chosen few) — and only that ring's devices ever get the key. Messages between you and a friend never pass through anyone else, not even as scrambled bytes.
Tor
The network can't watch either.
Nodes reach each other over Tor. Your node gets a stable onion address; traffic is encrypted in transit and no relay — ours or anyone's — sees who talks to whom. The trade-off, stated plainly: connecting takes seconds, not milliseconds. We think that's the right trade.
Honest limits
What Kreds can't do.
- A screenshot survives everything. If someone you trusted photographs their screen, no protocol on earth helps.
- Deletion is a promise kept by honest software. Deleting reaches every friend's device and compliant apps obey — but a modified app can keep what it already received. Deletion is real; it is not DRM.
- Someone using your unlocked device sees what you'd see. App-lock protects a stolen or sleeping machine, not one you handed over open.
We'd rather tell you this on the front page than in a settings menu.