Overview
# What is Wahay?
Wahay is an easy-to-use, secure and decentralized audio conference call application. It allows you to easily host and participate in conference calls, without the need for any centralized servers or services. We are building a voice call application that is meant to be as easy-to-use as possible, while still providing extremely high security and privacy out of the box. With Wahay you don’t only protect the content of a conversation, you also protect the fact that the conversation existed.
To achieve this, Wahay uses the Tor Onion Services iin order to communicate between the end-points and Mumble protocol for the actual voice communication.
For end-users, we provide several options for the installation (Please, take a look to the instructions. If you are a developer, installing the application should be as easy as cloningthe repository and running make build.
Wahay is currently under active development. There have been no security audits of the code and you shouldn’t use it for anything sensitive.
# Architecture
Traditional voice over IP (VoIP) solutions work in a centralized architecture where a central server coordinates all the communications. Having a central server or service provider means that you have to fully trust those who manage the servers are not monitoring your calls. This monitoring can mean looking at metadata (who is talking with whom) or even listening or recording calls. Wahay architecture is different as there is no external server providers. All communications can be coordinated by those who participate in the meeting. That means there are no service providers that can snoop on your communications.
To achieve this Wahay has two main components: Mumble and Tor. Mumble is an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat system that works in a client server architecture. Wahay bundles the Grumbleserver that coordinates the meeting communications and integrates the Mumble client to join meetings. The person hosting the meeting is actually running a Grumble server, and the people joining the meeting would use the Mumble client. All this process happens inside Wahay in a transparent way.
Normally you would need a public IP to allow people to join your own server. Wahay solves this issue by using Tor Onion Services. Tor Onion services allow any TCP protocol to be accessible within the Tor network with an Onion address. This addresses look like 275r32vufmt2ibojxga4w6jhasjud2lm5d2sehyljhggjpivwtwsc4yd.onion, and we use them as conference meeting URLs. Onion Services are encrypted between clients and the service providing the security for the system.
# Compatibility
The current version of Wahay is compatible with all major Linux distributions. It’s possible that the application works on OS X or Windows, but at this moment we have not tested this features. We are planning on adding official OS X and Windows compatibility in the near future.
# About
Wahay is being developed by the NGOCentro de Autonomía Digital, based in Quito, Ecuador. It is licensed under the GPL version 3.
# Next steps
Read about installing Wahay.