Ligature Protocol¶
Your devices, working as one. What you copy, the notifications you get and the files you share move between the devices you own, directly, over your own network: no account, no server, no company in between. An open protocol, with apps for Linux, macOS and Android.
Install the apps Read the user guide Releases
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One clipboard
Copy on the laptop, paste on the phone. Text, formatted text, images and files; large content is fetched only when you paste it.
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Notifications everywhere
A message that pops up on the phone shows on the desktop with the app's icon, and dismissing it anywhere clears it everywhere the platform allows.
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Files between devices
Share from the phone or send from the command line; files land in the other device's download folder, with progress and a cancel at either end.
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Yours alone
You are a key your first device creates. Devices join by an in-person ceremony, every session is end-to-end encrypted, and nothing lives outside your devices.
How it works¶
Ligature binds a person's devices into one trusted group. A person is an Ed25519 key, created on their first device; each device gets its own keys, signed in by the person's introducer devices in a proximity ceremony with a QR code and a six-digit code. Devices find each other on the local network and hold one QUIC connection per pair, with TLS 1.3 and their own keys as the credentials, so the session itself is the end-to-end layer. Over it, devices advertise capabilities (clipboard, notifications, files, and more to come) and use each other's. There is no shared database: each device keeps its own signed facts and gossips them to its peers, revocations first. The specification has the whole design, and the repository holds the decisions behind it, the plans for what comes next and the Rust implementation, which is both the reference and the product.
Status¶
Alpha. The releases carry pairing, the clipboard with text, HTML, images and files, notifications, and file transfer, between a Linux machine, a Mac and an Android phone on one network. Next come the phone's messages and calls and media control, then one keyboard and mouse across the desktops, then a screen viewed and controlled from another device. Remote connections, sharing between people and shared household devices are specified and not yet built. Each release is reviewed against the project's threat model before it goes out; the reports are in the repository.
Specification and documentation CC-BY-4.0, code Apache-2.0.