skchat — AI-Native Encrypted Chat 🐧

Chat should be sovereign — and your AI should be in the room. Text, voice, and files between humans and AI agents, end-to-end PGP-encrypted, carried over your own transports, identified by your own keys. No SaaS, no bolted-on chatbot — the AI is a first-class participant with its own identity.

skchat is the chat experience of the SKWorld sovereign agent ecosystem — the human-and-AI conversation surface that sits on top of skcomms (transport) and capauth (identity). It is a single Python package (skchat-sovereign) that ships a CLI, a Textual TUI, a Web UI, a systemd daemon, and an MCP server so agents running inside Claude Code / Cursor / any MCP host can send, receive, react, call, and transfer files as native tools.

⚠️ Crypto component. Experimental, pre-1.0, NOT independently security-audited. Crypto maturity: T1 (Agile) + T2 (Hybrid KEM, HKDF(X25519 ‖ ML-KEM-768), FIPS 203) on the surfaces skchat owns (device prekeys, 1:1 DM ratchet, new groups, at-rest DEK). T3 (Hybrid sig) NOT claimed, signatures are classical Ed25519/RSA. T4 (Transport closed) NOT claimed. skchat consumes its primitives (skcomms.pqkem, capauth, cryptography) rather than owning them; the original code is the composition, which is where protocol bugs live. No third-party audit, fuzzing, or formal review has been performed. A passing test suite proves interop and behaviour, not the absence of side channels or protocol flaws. Review it yourself before production use. Per-surface state and the documented exceptions (legacy classical groups, the reduced-assurance browser leg): SOP.md §9 · SECURITY.md. Runtime self-report: skchat pqc report.

The core idea: a message is composed locally, persisted to a local SQLite history, PGP-signed/encrypted, and handed to SKComm for delivery over whichever transport is healthy. When a message @mentions an agent, the AdvocacyEngine routes it into the live skcapstone consciousness loop and replies in-thread — so the AI answers for itself, in the same conversation, not through a separate bot.

The 60-second version

flowchart LR
    YOU["you type<br/>(CLI · TUI · WebUI · MCP)"] --> DAEMON["skchat daemon<br/>compose · persist · route"]
    DAEMON -->|"PGP sign/encrypt"| TX["ChatTransport"]
    TX -->|"hand to SKComm"| COMMS["skcomms<br/>(transport · failover)"]
    COMMS --> PEER["a peer or group<br/>(human or AI)"]
    DAEMON -->|"@mention an agent"| ADV["AdvocacyEngine"]
    ADV -->|"consciousness loop"| AI["the agent replies<br/>in-thread"]
    DAEMON --> HIST["ChatHistory<br/>(local SQLite)"]

Everything is local-first: messages live in ~/.skchat, voice (Piper TTS + Whisper STT) runs on-device, and identity is your own PGP key — that is the "sovereign" part.

Quickstart

skchat installs into the shared ~/.skenv venv like every other sk* package.

pip install -e .                      # PyPI name: skchat-sovereign
# entry points: skchat (CLI) · skchat-mcp (MCP server) · skchat-tui (TUI)

skchat status                         # identity, transport health, message counts
skchat send lumina "deploy complete"  # DM a peer by short name or full URI
skchat inbox --watch                  # live-updating inbox
skchat chat lumina                    # interactive session
skchat tui                            # full-screen Textual UI

Groups, voice, and files use the same CLI:

skchat group create "Sovereign Squad" -d "core team"
skchat group send <group_id> "standup time"
skchat voice                          # record → Whisper STT → send
skchat send-file lumina ./blueprint.md
skchat react <message_id> 👍

Run as a managed service (preferred — do not skchat daemon start by hand, which spawns a second unmanaged daemon):

systemctl --user restart skchat-daemon.service
journalctl --user -u skchat-daemon -f

Identity resolves agent-aware from SKAGENT (→ capauth:<agent>@skworld.io); no SKCHAT_IDENTITY pin is required. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full request lifecycle and module map.

What's in the box

Two modes of operation

• Secured — full CapAuth identity, AI advocate active, every message PGP-encrypted and every file capability-gated.
• Standalone — skchat runs fully on its own (PGP keys only). When the optional skcapstone extra is present it lights up advocacy, the sk-alert bus, and the skscheduler outbox sweep; when absent, every call degrades gracefully to local logging / notify-send and the daemon's own loop.

Where it lives in SKStack v2

skchat is a comms capability. It is a thin, opinionated experience layer: it owns conversation, presence, advocacy, and the UIs — and delegates the hard parts to dedicated ports. Transport is skcomms, identity is capauth, and the agent reasoning behind @mention advocacy comes from the skcapstone consciousness loop (skmodel-backed). It reuses two shared platform primitives — sk-alert and skscheduler — only when skcapstone is present.

flowchart TD
    OP["operator / agent"] -->|"skchat send · skchat-mcp · TUI"| SKCHAT

    subgraph COMMS["Comms"]
      SKCHAT["**skchat**<br/>conversation · groups · presence<br/>AI advocacy · voice · MCP tools"]
      SKCOMMS["skcomms<br/>(transport · PGP · failover)"]
      SKVOICE["skvoice<br/>(Piper TTS · Whisper STT)"]
    end
    subgraph CORE["Core"]
      CAPAUTH["capauth<br/>(identity — resolve_agent_identity)"]
      SKMEMORY["skmemory<br/>(thread capture)"]
    end
    subgraph COMPUTE["Compute"]
      SKMODEL["skmodel (ollama)<br/>(advocacy reasoning)"]
    end
    subgraph PLATFORM["Platform primitives skchat reuses"]
      ALERT["sk-alert bus<br/>(when skcapstone present)"]
      SCHED["skscheduler<br/>(outbox-flush sweep)"]
    end

    SKCHAT -->|"messages over"| SKCOMMS
    SKCHAT -->|"resolve identity"| CAPAUTH
    SKCHAT -->|"TTS / STT"| SKVOICE
    SKCHAT -->|"@mention → consciousness loop"| SKMODEL
    SKCHAT -->|"capture threads"| SKMEMORY
    SKCHAT -.->|"alerts"| ALERT
    SKCHAT -.->|"register outbox sweep"| SCHED

The dashed edges are optional (default-on-by-presence): skchat works standalone, and only wires into the sk-alert / skscheduler platform primitives when the skcapstone extra is installed.

Documentation

Security & Quantum-Resistance (requirement)

skchat is a confidentiality surface, so it carries a hard quantum-resistance requirement. Honest current status + target:

• Already quantum-resistant (🟢): the group-message cipher (AES-256-GCM, group.py:GroupMessageEncryptor) and the at-rest store (HKDF-SHA256 + AES-256-GCM, encrypted_store.py) are symmetric/hash — Grover-only, ≥128-bit worst case. Do not touch them. Only their key-wrapping / key-distribution is the problem.
• Classical today (🔴, highest leverage): group-key distribution (group.py:652 GroupKeyDistributor) PGP-wraps a static os.urandom(32) group key per member — break one member's classical key and you recover the AES group key and decrypt all group history (Harvest-Now-Decrypt-Later). The 1:1 DM wrap (crypto.py) is HNDL-vulnerable too; the at-rest store also has a classical low-entropy bug (DEK derived from the PGP fingerprint), fixable regardless of quantum.
• Target (going-forward bar): hybrid post-quantum — X25519 + ML-KEM-768 KEM (FIPS 203) with per-epoch ratcheted group keys (forward secrecy + post-compromise security the static key has none of); combiner K = HKDF-SHA256(X25519_ss ‖ MLKEM768_ss) (concatenate-then-KDF, never XOR/pure-PQ); ML-DSA-65 + Ed25519 hybrid signatures (FIPS 204) later. HNDL-first, crypto-agile (kem_suite/epoch ids + suite registry).
• Browser/Flutter gap: WebCrypto has no PQC — native clients (Flutter/desktop) get full hybrid via liboqs FFI; the web PWA is a documented reduced-assurance leg (see docs/crypto-architecture.md §7). No claim may imply the browser is E2E PQ.

Honest-claim rule: every claim cites surface + FIPS # + hybrid-vs-classical, backed by a runtime self-report. Never say "quantum-proof," unscoped "end-to-end quantum-resistant," or "CNSA-2.0" (we use the -768 hybrid tier). AES-256 is not "broken" by quantum.

Diagrams (current / future / gaps), the SK-wide identity/key flow, and per-surface remediation: docs/crypto-architecture.md. Master plan: docs/quantum-resistance-architecture.md; epic PQC-MIGRATION (coord e1d6ba2a).

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — because communication is a right, not a product.

Part of the SKWorld sovereign ecosystem · site: skchat.skworld.io · 🐧 smilinTux