Tlx
E2E chat over SSH under 500 lines of code
Details
- External ID
- 49842877
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Tlx
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Sept. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.12998405103668262
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 29, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 29, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Description
This is a reference implementation of encrypted chats for small trusted groups.It runs SSH server in a container that acts as a mailbox for opaque encrypted blobs (145 lines of code).SSH keys serve as an identity.Then a local demon syncs and decrypts these blobs into SQLite database (321 lines of code).I wanted to make crypto as simple as possible and have only widely used and well audited components.Relay server and sync demon are implemented in standard Python without any extra dependencies.I've chosen Python as it ships with SQLite client in standard library. Could have used go/rust, but wanted to keep reference implementation as simple as possible with minimal dependencies.
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Communication
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- minimalist end-to-end encrypted chat over ssh
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes The system is explicitly designed as a tiny minimal reference implementation (under 500 lines of code) gluing standard SSH commands, SQLite, and crypto libraries. An LLM can easily generate the shell/python daemon and container configs for this.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Unclear use cases and target audience
Feature requests: Ports to Ruby, Lisp, Rust, or Go
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 138 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #121 of 139 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 330 days after the earliest competitor.
- A password system with no database, no sync, and nothing to breach · hn · 2026-02-06 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Wormhole.page · hn · 2026-03-22 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Tt · hn · 2026-01-06 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Kant · github · 2026-09-20 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- CipherStash Stack · hn · 2026-05-21 · 17 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Ellipticc Drive · hn · 2025-10-30 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- SRIFT · ph · 2026-09-18 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- SendKey · ph · 2026-09-08 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.