Amigo: Secure Group Mesh Messaging in Realistic Protest Settings

Amigo introduces a decentralized continuous key agreement protocol and novel routing scheme for secure group mesh messaging over short-range radio (Bluetooth/ Wi-Fi Direct) when governments disable the Internet during protests. Extensive simulations demonstrate that prior approaches fail to scale to realistic protest environments that have high link churn, physical spectrum contention, and dense mobility — Amigo's protest-specific optimizations address these but also reveal that scaling to protests with thousands of participants remains an open challenge.

§Abstract defense dpi generic

Simulations show that previous secure mesh messaging systems fail to provide efficient private group communication under realistic protest conditions — specifically high node mobility, link churn, and RF spectrum contention — conditions that prior work did not evaluate. Bridgefy, the most widely deployed protest mesh app, was broken cryptographically in 2021 and 2022, and even its successor designs lack the scalability needed for protests with thousands of participants.

§Abstract, §Simulations evaluation dpi generic