History

SmallChat has been designed by Valentino Giudice, but the original idea of creating a peer to peer chat is by Samuele Pilleri.

SmallChat was born in 2015: Samuele and Valentino were classmates at IIS G. Vallauri (Fossano).

The school proxy blocked a lot of traffic, including Gmail chat, so Samuele had the idea to create a chat suitable to be used in the class without being blocked and, on Pi Day (3rd April), it proposed it to Valentino.

They started brainstorming and Samuele concluded the chat could not have been a console application.

On 26th June Valentino sent an e-mail to Samuele; as an attachment, TrivialChat, a C# peer to peer chat. The interface was console.

Messages were encrypted using 3-DES and each separate communication needed a different port.

Samuele and Valentino discussed about a better name than TrivialChat (which was already associated with a website).

On 27th June (just the next day), Valentino sent the first C# version of SmallChat. It still used 3-DES.

When converting to C, Valentino was unable to find equivalent C and C# implementation of 3-DES, so he invented his own encryption algorithm: SCEDA (SmallChat Encryption-Decryption Algorithm), on 30 June and 1st July.

On 7th July 2015 Valentino Giudice sent an application to IANA for a port number and service name and on 18th August 2015 IANA officially assigned the registered UDP port number 4412 to SmallChat.

On 26th August Valentino finished the first official version of the SmallChat protocol and the next day (27th August), it committed it to GitHub under Expat License (like adviced by Samuele).