House chat
- Each house has its own private chat for the people you share it with.
- Messages and photos go directly between the house's own Home Assistant and your paired phones. There is no Patrimony chat server.
- On the house, messages and photos are kept encrypted at rest.
- Notifications say only that there's a new message. No text, sender or photo is included.
- Messages can disappear after an hour, a day or a week, or be kept.
- You can lock the chat with Face ID.
- Chat travels over standard SSL/TLS between your phone and the house.
Sealed invites
- When you invite someone, your iPhone seals the house's connection details to their phone. Our server stores only the sealed version, which it can't open.
- Each member gets their own key to the house, kept in the Keychain on that phone only.
- Members get view-only access to the home and its chat: a live view of the home, and they can read the chat but not post or delete.
- Remove a member and their access ends immediately.
PQ Shield currently protects the owner's live connection to the house. Members and chat use standard SSL/TLS today.
Technical notes
Invites are sealed with ECDH P-256, HKDF and AES-256-GCM, and signed by the owner's phone.