Even with advanced forms of end-to-end encryption and other privacy measures, these centralized servers present security and privacy risks. These servers host and process all messages in the network and become major privacy and security risks as they become single points of failure and centralized attack vectors.
In traditional client-server networks (in use by most major messaging applications today), messages are sent from person A (Alice) to a central server in the network for processing and then forwarded on to person B (Bob). In very simple terms, peer-to-peer messaging removes the need for centralized third party servers to pass messages throughout a network. A 3,000ft overview of peer-to-peer messaging? This post will briefly explain some of the key concepts of peer-to-peer messaging, the shortcomings of Whisper, how Waku addresses those issues and the tradeoffs made. Waku aims to solve some of the issues of Whisper in an iterative fashion and enable greater scalability. It introduces Waku – a fork of the previously used peer-to-peer messaging protocol Whisper. Status v1.2 is a significant milestone in the development of the private messenger, integrated crypto wallet, and secure web3 browser.