5.2. Glossary

This section is here to translate a few recurring terms into plain language.

Wallet A cryptographic identity (like a Phantom wallet on Solana) that can sign transactions and prove ownership of an address. In Obscura, this is your “account” instead of a phone number or email.

Messaging keypair A pair of keys used specifically for encrypting and decrypting messages. The public part is shared so others can send you encrypted data; the private part stays on your device and is used to decrypt. It is separate from the wallet’s transaction key but tied to the same identity.

Plaintext The human-readable message content before encryption and after decryption. This only exists on user devices in Obscura, not on the server.

Ciphertext The scrambled, unreadable version of the message that results from encryption. This is what Obscura’s backend stores in the database. Without the correct private key on the client side, ciphertext cannot be turned back into plaintext.

End-to-end encryption A model where the message is encrypted on the sender’s device and decrypted on the recipient’s device, with no intermediate point (like the server) able to see the message content. This is the default assumption in Obscura’s design.

Metadata Information about communication rather than the content itself: who is talking to whom, when messages are sent, and how often. In the current MVP, the server still sees basic metadata for routing, even though it cannot see message text. More advanced privacy work in the future would focus on reducing how much metadata is exposed.