Session Desktop

Download at getsession.org

Summary

Session integrates directly with Oxen Service Nodes, which are a set of distributed, decentralized and Sybil resistant nodes. Service Nodes act as servers which store messages offline, and a set of nodes which allow for onion routing functionality obfuscating users IP Addresses. For a full understanding of how Session works, read the Session Whitepaper.

Want to Contribute? Found a Bug or Have a feature request?

Please search for any existing issues that describe your bug in order to avoid duplicate submissions.

Submissions can be made by making a pull request to our development branch.If you don't know where to start contributing please read Contributing.md and refer to issues tagged with the good-first-issue tag.

Supported platforms

Session requires Windows 10 or later, macOS Ventura (13) or later, or a Linux distribution with glibc 2.28 or later like Debian 10 or Ubuntu 20.04.

Build instructions

Build instructions can be found in Contributing.md.

Translations

Want to help us translate Session into your language? You can do so at https://getsession.org/translate!

Verifying signatures

Step 1:

Add Jason's GPG key. Jason Rhinelander, a member of the Session Technology Foundation and is the current signer for all Session Desktop releases. His GPG key can be found on his GitHub and other sources.

wget https://github.com/jagerman.gpg
gpg --import jagerman.gpg

Step 2:

Get the signed hashes for this release. SESSION_VERSION needs to be updated for the release you want to verify.

export SESSION_VERSION=1.15.0
wget https://github.com/session-foundation/session-desktop/releases/download/v$SESSION_VERSION/signature.asc

Step 3:

Verify the signature of the hashes of the files.

gpg --verify signature.asc 2>&1 |grep "Good signature from"

The command above should print "Good signature from "Jason Rhinelander...". If it does, the hashes are valid but we still have to make the sure the signed hashes match the downloaded files.

Step 4:

Make sure the two commands below return the same hash for the file you are checking. If they do, file is valid.

Linux

sha256sum session-desktop-linux-amd64-$SESSION_VERSION.deb
grep .deb signature.asc

macOS

Apple Silicon

sha256sum releases/session-desktop-mac-arm64-$SESSION_VERSION.dmg
grep .dmg signature.asc

Intel

sha256sum releases/session-desktop-mac-x64-$SESSION_VERSION.dmg
grep .dmg signature.asc

Windows

Powershell

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 session-desktop-win-x64-$SESSION_VERSION.exe  # checksum is uppercase but should otherwise match
Select-String -Pattern ".exe" signature.asc

Bash

sha256sum session-desktop-win-x64-$SESSION_VERSION.exe
grep .exe signature.asc

Debian repository

Please visit https://deb.oxen.io/

License

Copyright 2011 Whisper Systems

Copyright 2013-2017 Open Whisper Systems

Copyright 2019-2024 The Oxen Project

Copyright 2024-2025 Session Technology Foundation

Licensed under the GPLv3: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Attributions

The IP-to-country mapping data used in this project is provided by MaxMind GeoLite2.

This project uses the Lucide Icon Font, which is licensed under the ISC License.