Table of Contents

Casual users

What is Vela?

What Vela is not?

Who is Vela for?

What features are not possible in Vela?

Is Vela ready to be used by the average computer user?

What are Vela's main features?

What are Vela's advantages over encrypted email?

Is Vela truly decentralized?

What is a UPN?

What are the minimum requirements to run Vela?

How can I know if I can use Vela?

How do I install Vela?

Can Vela be used on a network without IPv6 support?

Why is IPv6 network support required if there are many people who don't have it?

How can I check if my computer has an IPv6 connection?

What is the alternative peer address?

Does Vela work if my computer is connected to a router?

Can someone outside a company communicate with someone inside the company?

Can I send letters from work to my home when the PNRP and port forwarding are blocked by the company?

How does Vela perform peer routability?

PNRP

IP address

Host name

Is the PNRP needed all the time?

Even with the existing decentralization, is it possible for censors to stop communication through Vela on a mass scale (but without shutting down the Internet)?

What information is Vela sending outside my computer?

What information is being exposed (on the network)?

Is there a problem if I make my UPNs public?

Is my physical location exposed to the people who know my UPN?

How secure is Vela?

Can anyone who monitors my Internet traffic know that I am using Vela?

Can the Vela Entity provide my documents (like vaults, letters) to others (like law enforcement)?

Can Microsoft know anything about Vela's users?

Is the communication secure if the DNS is compromised?

Is the communication secure if IP addresses are routed to the wrong computers?

How does Vela scale in a large network of users?

How are letters sent?

Are the letters digitally signed by the sender?

Why are the letters signed?

What is the maximum total size of the files attached to a letter?

How are the files attached to a letter being transferred?

How is the file transfer speed affected by all the security?

How many letters can be processed simultaneously?

How can I use Vela only offline?

Where is all the information stored?

How many letters can fit in a storehouse?

Can I log in to my storehouse from other computers?

What are the characters displayed in the password boxes? Can they reveal my password?

How can I have a strong password?

What is a password obfuscation algorithm?

Is it necessary to use non-alphanumeric characters and both letter capitalizations in a strong password?

How can I keep my password as safe as possible?

How can I find out what an element of the user interface does?

How long did it take to make Vela?

Why have you made Vela?

Why do you care more about privacy than law?

But some people are trying to kill us! That's clearly more important than anyone's privacy!

Is Vela backdoored?

What license terms cover Vela?

What do you mean "you may claim ownership of the work, but not the name"?

Can I use the name or the images from Vela in my own work?

How can I use the emoticons from Vela in my own work?

Can I make a donation for Vela?

Credits

Working with features

How do I work with account aliases?

How do I attach folders to a letter?

How do I send a wallpaper?

How do I block a contact?

How do I auto-open a storehouse with the application?

How do I play the media files attached to a letter?

VLC command line

Foobar2000 command line

IrfanView command line

How do I add custom emoticons to my Vela?

How do I update the custom emoticons of a contact?

How do I send unsigned letters?

I want to send information to a journalist, but I must avoid being tracked online. How do I do this with Vela?

Troubleshooting

Is there a checklist to go through if Vela can't communicate with a contact?

Manually check the PNRP state

Manually check the connection to a contact

Why is the file transfer speed awful?

Why can't I see the photo of a contact?

Why can't I see the wallpapers sent by a contact?

When I change the photo in my vault, why don't my contacts receive the new photo?

Why can't I delete all the letters with the "Main" flag?

Why does it take so long to queue a letter for sending, from the time I click "Send" until the text-box is cleared?

Why are letters sometimes sent with a significant delay after the time shown in their tooltips?

When I send a letter with attached media files, I get back an error about signatures?

When Vela starts, the system tray icon is green, but after a few minutes it becomes blue. What's wrong?

The PNRP appears to be working, but the "Number of cache entries" and "Estimated cloud size" are very low. What's wrong?

Vela can't forward ports, file transfer barely works. What's wrong?

The tooltip of Vela's system tray icon says that there is "No Internet PNRP", but it used to be fine. How do I fix this?

Letters are no longer sent between two computers even though both show a green system tray icon. How do I solve this?

I see an error in the state of the letters that I am trying to send, which says "An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by it's access permissions". What is the problem?

My letters are sent intermittently to (some of) my contacts. What's wrong?

Are there any known issues?

My computer seems to be working very hard in the middle of the night (at 3 AM). The fan is really annoying. What's going on?

Advanced users

How should the firewall be configured in order to be able to use Vela?

How can Vela work through a strict firewall?

What are the network structures used by Vela?

The peer-to-peer network

The friend-to-friend network

What cryptographic algorithms does Vela use?

What does a UPN contain?

How does Vela ensure that there are no man-in-the-middle attacks?

How does Vela transfer information between peers?

Does Vela protect the size of the transferred information?

Does Vela provide backward secrecy?

Why doesn't Vela provide backward secrecy?

Does Vela provide forward secrecy?

You are using backward / forward secrecy the wrong way.

What is asymmetric encryption?

Characters in the story

Needs

How it works

How do you know that your source code was not compromised?

Don't you know that Windows is backdoored?

How can I do serious computer security?

Firewall lockdown

Hidden information

Developers

What is the Vela framework?

Scalability

Does Vela work on non-Windows operating systems?

Since Vela is decentralized, does it mean that I can make my own application and that would work with the existing user base?

I want to build Vela myself from the source code. Is there anything special that I should know?

What's the easiest way to build Vela?

Why do different builds of Vela produce different binary outputs for the same source code?

Is it acceptable to deploy the debug version of Vela?

How do I debug Vela?

How can I run several instances of Vela on the same computer?

What does a vault document contain?

Can I use SQL Server FE (= Full Edition) for storehouses?

Troubleshooting

Why isn't the storehouse used the way an SQL database is meant to be used? Because of this, the performance is abysmal in some cases.

Is there a way to improve the storehouse performance?

How is a storehouse encrypted?

Are action requests digitally signed by the sender?

Can network filters or SSL proxies monitor Vela's unencrypted network traffic?

Will Vela ever encrypt the used secrets in the working memory?

Is there a plugin API?

If I would like to check if Vela can withstand cryptographic attacks, where should I start?

Glossary