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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T16:26:18+00:00

Hello I am developing an application that will exchange unique groups and messages belonging

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Hello I am developing an application that will exchange unique groups and messages belonging to them between peers within a local network without any servers. Each of the peers should be able to create a new message and associate it with an existing or new group. Since messages and groups should be unique I have implemented a hash algorithm creating the ID of those messages from static values like, content, date of creation, author, title (messages are not editable). The ID I am using is helping me check the integrity and possible duplicate when the message/group is sent to another device. But since there is no server to store accounts and check for credibility of each of the peers I cant think of a way to implement a mechanism that will check whether a given message is genuine from a specific author. At the moment anyone can publish messages adding a false author name, which is something I want to resolve. How can I do that?

PS. My application might be similiar to how Twitter works but it has no accounts and no main servers to store them. It is developed on android and it cannot use the internet simply because it is using wifi to connect to LAN only routers and I wouldn’t want the users to have to use 3G/edge.

Possible solutions:

  1. Use the phone’s special ID (IMEI) , but also how do I get that programatically and is it really unique?

  2. Use MAC Address of the phone (actually hashed concatanation of Bluetooth and WiFi MAC Address), is that unique per phone?
    The problem with this and the above is that the genuine author might change his phone over time.

  3. If the genuine author has logged on with his Google Account previously is it stored in the phone’s memory and can I programatically get this information in offline mode?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The use of Digital Certificates to sign messages could also be a solution. Although its use may raise some more questions like “Who’s the issuer?“. Well, it could be an “entity” created by you if the authenticity of the messages are only important inside your own application.

    Just something to consider if you haven’t already.

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