Wire

Wire is a secure messenger aimed at organizations, and the whole of it is published: the mobile, desktop, and web clients, the encryption layer, the audio and video stack, and the server that ties them together. A team that needs to audit what its messaging tool does, or run the backend itself, can do both.

Each piece is written in the language its job calls for. Core Crypto, which holds the Axolotl protocol implementation along with the supporting cryptographic and utility libraries, is Rust cross-compiled for iOS, Android, and WebAssembly. The audio, video, and signaling library is ANSI C and C++, cross-compiled the same way, with Java and Objective-C wrappers for the mobile platforms. Protocol buffer definitions shared by every client govern both client-to-client and backend communication.

The server splits into services along the lines of what each one owns.

• brig: accounts.
• galley: conversations and teams.
• gundeck: the push notification hub.
• cannon: WebSocket push notifications.
• cargohold: storage for images, files, and other assets.
• spar: single sign-on.
• nginz: the public API reverse proxy, an Nginx build carrying a custom authorization module.

Self-hosting is documented for Kubernetes, with Helm charts in the repository and mirrored for use through a chart repository. Contributions require signing a contributor agreement and are limited to bug fixes and code improvements, since features and interface changes are decided by the Wire team. Translations are crowdsourced on Crowdin, and privacy and security whitepapers document the algorithms and protocols in detail.