Mini Donkey is a platform-independent encryption app

Mini Donkey is an app that encrypts and hides messages using AES encryption and steganography.

Since Mini Donkey itself is not a service, it works with all social media apps that support sending images.

Motivations

It all started when a couple of friends complained that they couldn’t send important messages to friends and families without being under surveillance due to regional restrictions.

Unfortunately, privacy-preserving services aren’t available in those regions for obvious reasons.

I thought “wow, that’s not cool”, especially in 2020 where social media has become an essential part of our lives.

After researching a few privacy-preserving messaging apps, I found:

• They are easily blocked because they still rely on services/internet access.
• They present heavy vendor-lockin and it’s hard to convince others to move away from popular social media platforms.

Due to the two issues above, few people end up using those apps and, as a result, privacy is wildly exposed.

Is it possible to properly address the issues above? What if there is an app that:

• Works completely offline.
• Attaches to any popular social media platform.

The answer I worked out was Mini Donkey and let me use two diagrams to demonstrate the main idea:

I know you might be thinking “that’s a lot of effort to send a message”. I totally agree, but, in fact, only 1% of our communication (e.g. my password is XXX) needs this kind of encryption, so use it only as a secret weapon.

Mini Donkey focus on privacy and nothing else

To make sure Mini Donkey fulfills its purpose to protect privacy, I built it to be:

• Open-source so that everyone can audit and improve it.
• Ads-free to reduce distractions and focus on the mission.
• Works 100% offline to avoid censorship.
• Works on as many social media platforms as possible.

Achieving the goals isn’t easy, so I will need help from the community:

What can you get by contributing?

The things to get out of contributing to Mini Donkey includes but definitely not limited to:

• Add an interesting production-grade cross-platform app to your resume.
• Help secure privacy for people who need it.
• Level up your Flutter skills.
• Level up your Android/iOS dev skills.
• Level up your GitHub Actions skills.
• Level up your JavaScript skills.
• Level up your Fastlane skills.
• Hands-on project management experience.
• Hands-on open-source contributing experience.
• Know the open-source project workflow better.
• Many more…

What technologies are used?

The Mini Donkey tech stack:

• App: Flutter/Dart
• App platform-specific integrations: Swift/Kotlin/Objective-C/JavaScript
• App automation: Fastlane/Ruby
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Documentation: Vue.js/VuePress/JavaScript

What are some ways to contribute?

The ways to contribute include but, again, definitely not limited to:

• Implement a feature
• Fix a bug
• Refactor code
• Propose a feature
• Report a bug
• Add clarifying comments
• Add documentation
• Improve CI/CD workflows
• Fix typos
• Brainstorm ideas
• Triage issues
• Clean up issues
• And, of course, many more…

How to get involved?

To get involved in the project, please follow the steps (for more details, see the contribution guideline in the repository):

1. Pick an issue (if the one you want to work on doesn’t exist, feel free to open one).
2. Comment on the issue with a plan to claim ownership.
3. Work on it.
4. Open a pull request and make sure tests are passing.
5. Request a review.
6. Resolve the suggestions from the reviewer.
7. Wait for a bit. The pull request will merge within a day.
8. Have a cup of coffee. Hooray! You just contribute to the project!

Thanks for reading and happy hacking! ;)

If you like the idea of the Mini Donkey project, please make sure to:

• Give the Mini Donkey repository a star.
• Follow the Mini Donkey publication.

References

Mini Donkey project home:

MiniDonkey101

Mini Donkey repository:

tianhaoz95/photochat

Looking for a Flutter App to Build? was originally published in MiniDonkey101 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mini Donkey v1.0.6 is the first release after the alpha which focuses on improving message composing experience.

Note: for people who don’t know what Mini Donkey is, please read the introduction: Mini Donkey 101.

Image Capacity Indicator

Steganography is the practice of hiding data in images.

Every image can only carry a certain amount of data.

Without monitoring, if the image is of low resolution, the data can easily exceed the capacity of the image.

To make sure data overflowing doesn’t happen, Mini Donkey v1.0.6 introduced a real-time capacity usage indicator:

Random Carrier Image Generator

Uploading your own images have a couple of drawbacks:

• It’s time-consuming.
• It can compromise your privacy if certain photos are picked accidentally.

To offer a better experience, Mini Donkey v1.0.6 introduced the random carrier image generator:

Happy Hacking!

If you like the idea of Mini Donkey, please make sure to:

• Follow Mini Donkey blog:

MiniDonkey101

• Star the Mini Donkey repository on GitHub:

tianhaoz95/photochat

• Follow me on Medium, maybe ;)

Jackson Zhou - Medium

• Subscribe to the YouTube channel for more feature updates:

The SWE II

• Subscribe to my newsletter for the latest updates/content:

The latest knowledge in Tech.

Thanks for reading ;)

New Features in Mini Donkey v1.0.6 was originally published in MiniDonkey101 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As social media is growing to be an essential part of our daily communication, privacy issues have become concerning.

However, existing privacy-preserving messaging apps are:

• Vulnerable to service blocking (What if the app/server is banned?)
• Alerting (Attention please! I am encrypted!)

Mini Donkey is an app that encrypts messages with camouflage

By contrast, Mini Donkey aims to be:

• Service independent (completely offline and produces encrypted messages that are compatible with all platforms).
• Camouflage (produces encrypted messages that appear deceptively public).

With the restrictions above in mind, I designed Mini Donkey to first encrypt messages with a one-time password and then encode the message into an image as camouflage.

Here is a diagram showing how the encoding flow works:

The decoding path is more straightforward, and here is a diagram illustrating how decoding message from image works:

Let’s see it in action

Here is how the encoding flow works in action:

Here is how the decoding flow works in action:

Thanks for reading!

The Mini Donkey app is available on Google Play Store:

MiniDonkey - Apps on Google Play

If you like the idea of Mini Donkey, please:

• Follow the Mini Donkey publication and the author (maybe? haha)
• Give the Mini Donkey repository a start ;)
• Give Mini Donkey a review on Google Play Store
• Subscribe to newsletter for the latest updates

Hooray! Mini Donkey is Here! was originally published in MiniDonkey101 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.