This is a bot that performs secure autonomous monitoring of an entire organization's messaging traffic, storing all messages and useful metadata to support basic forensic searching and retrieval of messages via a UI on the bot's website.
Future plans include supporting vault access via messages from authorized users.
This is a descendant of the Forsta Messaging Bot codebase, which you can use for secure message receipt, processing, storage, and/or transmission on the Forsta messaging platform.
What is important to Forsta is that your messaging data is only accessible to messaging clients that you are in control of, whether the client is an app running on the phone in your pocket, or a bot that is running on a server in your datacenter or the compute cloud of your choice.
Some organizations need to be able perform forensic e-discovery on past messages. Others may need to be able to automatically monitor for transmission of sensitive information. Or maybe they want something to automatically deliver sensitive information, or answer help-desk questions and handle after-hours inquires. Or individual users might want to be able to securely access their own message histories after buying a new phone and reinstalling their messaging client.
There are countless needs like these, and typically they are satisfied using centrally-managed infrastructure that can receive, store, process, and respond to messages as needed. Even systems that have pluggable architectures to facilitate outside development of these sorts of capabilities usually rely on a centralized approach. Unfortunately, the centralized approach provides a tempting, centralized target for outside attackers -- and it also requires users to trust that insiders won't abuse their access to all messages. Forsta is different.
Forsta does not offer anything that depends on centralized receipt, storage, or processing of users’ messaging data. Instead, Forsta makes it trivial for others to run messaging “bots” to perform these functions. These bots are just another kind of messaging client, like the messaging clients running in users’ browsers and on their phones. And just like the other messaging clients, Forsta bots send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages to do their work while running in a context controlled by the user.
These deployment buttons can be used to validate that this message vault will meet your organizations needs with as little setup pain as possible.
- Node.js 8 (or newer)
- Ruby
- sass (
gem install sass)
- sass (
You can choose from our official docker image or NPM package depending on your preference.
docker run -p4096:4096 forstalabs/message-vault
Or to run a stack using docker-compose that includes redis for storage...
docker-compose up
npm install -g forsta-message-vault
message-vault
If you want to build upon the Forsta Message Vault or just get closer to the code, you can install and run directly from the source code.
git clone https://github.com/ForstaLabs/message-vault.git
cd message-vault
npm install
npm start
Once running, the default port and listening address are 0.0.0.0:4096. If
you are running locally you can access the web interface by opening
http://localhost:4096.
You can change the listening address by setting LISTEN_ADDR to a valid host
address for your server, E.g. something like localhost or 127.0.0.1 to only
accept local connections.
The default listening port can be changed by setting PORT to any valid
numeric port, e.g. 8000.
Storage is managed through Forsta librelay which currently supports local filesystem and Redis. For more information about setting up custom storage see: https://github.com/ForstaLabs/librelay-node#storage.
Licensed under the GPLv3: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
- Copyright 2015-2016 Open Whisper Systems
- Copyright 2017-2018 Forsta Inc.