🔦 Rushlight

A flame that needs no wire.

Offline field intelligence for Android. AI assistant, encrypted P2P comms, shared map annotations, offline Wikipedia, morse code, and navigation — all running locally on your phone with zero internet required.

Built for journalists, activists, humanitarian workers, and anyone who needs to operate in low-connectivity or high-surveillance environments. No cloud. No accounts. No telemetry. Everything stays on your device.

Why This Exists

In late 2025, Iran's government shut down internet access during political unrest — jamming Starlink, blocking VPNs, cutting data. Millions of people had smartphones in their pockets that were suddenly useless. They couldn't navigate to safety. They couldn't access emergency information. They couldn't coordinate.

This pattern repeats. Myanmar. Russia. China. Venezuela. 375 million people face active internet censorship. Billions more face connectivity failures during crises.

Existing tools fail at exactly the moment they're needed most. Cloud-based AI assistants are blocked or surveilled. Offline maps work, but only if you know precise street names — impossible when you're under stress, in an unfamiliar area, or operating in a language that isn't yours.

Rushlight is the layer that keeps your phone useful when the network is hostile.

📸 Demo

Click to watch the demo video

✨ What It Does

| Feature | Description | |---------|-------------| | 📌 FieldNotes | Shared map annotations that sync device-to-device — like Dark Souls messages for the real world. Pin notes to GPS coordinates, sign them with ECDSA P-256, and let them propagate through the mesh. The on-device AI can query them: "Is there water nearby?" | | 🤖 Offline AI | On-device LLM (llama.cpp) with RAG pipeline — answers questions from offline Wikipedia, 26 field guides, and nearby FieldNotes. No internet. Ever. | | 📡 P2P Sharing | BLE discovery + WiFi Direct transfer. Share maps, AI models, FieldNotes, and data device-to-device. ECDH + ChaCha20-Poly1305 encrypted. | | 🗺️ Navigation | Full OsmAnd mapping stack — offline vector maps, turn-by-turn routing, POI search. | | 📖 Offline Wikipedia | ZIM file reader with full-text search. The AI can cite Wikipedia in its responses. | | 📚 Field Guides | 26 bundled guides across 11 categories: First Aid, Water, Fire, Shelter, Navigation, Signaling, Food, Security, Engineering, Automotive, Electrical. | | 💡 Morse Code | Flashlight and audio transmission, camera/mic reception. AI-powered error correction. No accessories required. | | 🛡️ Security | Duress PIN, panic wipe, stealth mode (hidden from launcher, accessible via dialer code), AES-256-GCM encrypted chat storage, ECDSA-signed FieldNotes. | | 🎨 Pip-Boy Skin | Retro-futuristic green CRT terminal aesthetic. Because why not. |

📌 FieldNotes — Shared Map Intelligence

FieldNotes is Rushlight's flagship feature: a decentralized, cryptographically signed annotation system for offline maps.

Think of it as Dark Souls-style player messages, but for real-world field intelligence. Someone who passed through a checkpoint yesterday leaves information that reaches you today — no internet at any step.

How it works:

Long-press the map to drop a note at any GPS coordinate
Choose a category (water, shelter, hazard, cache, route, medical, signal, intel)
Your note is signed with your device's ECDSA P-256 keypair and stored locally
When another Rushlight user comes within BLE/WiFi range, notes gossip between devices automatically
Notes accumulate confirmations as they propagate and can be upvoted/downvoted for trust scoring
The on-device AI can query notes spatially — ask "what's nearby?" and it reads the collective field intelligence

Seeing it in action:

"What's the safest route to the crossing?" → AI pulls FieldNotes within 10km: "Highway 7 flagged checkpoint-heavy, 3 confirmations in last 48h" + "forest track passable on foot, 2 users confirmed yesterday" → Route recommendation based on current ground conditions, not pre-war maps

"Is there water nearby?" → Water source annotation 1.2km northeast, confirmed clean by 2 users 3 days ago → "Confirmed clean water 1.2km northeast — last verified 3 days ago"

"The bridge on the north road is washed out." → "Got it — should I log that as a FieldNote so others know?"

This is RAG with live crowd-sourced hyperlocal data instead of a static document corpus. No other offline AI assistant has this.

Why it matters:

No infrastructure needed. Notes sync peer-to-peer. No servers, no internet, no accounts.
Tamper-evident. Every note carries a cryptographic signature. Recipients can verify the note hasn't been modified in transit.
Privacy-preserving. Author identity is a public key hash — anonymous but unique and verifiable. Panic wipe generates a fresh identity.
Self-cleaning. Notes expire after their TTL (default: 1 week). Stale intelligence is automatically purged.
AI-integrated. The LLM can both read and write FieldNotes — ask it a question about your surroundings and it queries the annotation database. Tell it about a hazard and it creates a note for others.

Technical details:

| Component | Implementation | |-----------|---------------| | Storage | SQLite with content-addressed IDs (SHA-256 of core fields) | | Signing | ECDSA P-256, Android Keystore-backed keypairs | | Sync | JSON gossip over BLE + WiFi Direct mesh | | Spatial queries | Bounding-box SQL pre-filter + Haversine post-filter | | Trust | Upvote/downvote scoring, confirmation counting across peers | | LLM tools | query_fieldnotes and create_fieldnote wired into on-device AI | | Categories | 8 types with distinct icons and colors on the map overlay | | Expiry | TTL-based cleanup (CoT stale-event pattern from ATAK) |

🎯 Who It's For

Primary users — high-threat environments:

Activists in Iran, China, Myanmar, Russia, Venezuela facing internet shutdowns and surveillance
Journalists covering conflict zones or authoritarian regimes
Human rights defenders operating under targeted restrictions
Humanitarian workers in disaster and infrastructure-degraded areas

Secondary users:

Preppers and survivalists who want genuine offline capability
Rural communities with limited connectivity
Emergency responders when networks fail
Anyone who thinks their phone should work without a data connection

🏗️ Architecture

User Query
    ↓
QueryClassifier (11 query types)
    ↓ (parallel search)
    ├── ZimSearchAdapter       → Offline Wikipedia
    ├── GuideSearchAdapter     → 26 bundled field guides
    ├── MapDataAdapter         → Nearby map POIs
    ├── PlaceSearch            → Named location lookup
    └── FieldNotes tools       → Nearby annotations from P2P mesh
    ↓
PromptBuilder (adaptive context blending)
    ↓
LlmManager → llama.cpp JNI → Streaming response
                                    ↓ (optional)
                            create_fieldnote → map pin for others

FieldNotes Sync:
Device A ──BLE/WiFi──→ Device B ──BLE/WiFi──→ Device C
   ↓ sign (ECDSA P-256)    ↓ verify + store       ↓ gossip forward
   ↓ store locally          ↓ increment confirms   ↓ vote up/down

Core stack:

OsmAnd (Apache 2.0) — maps and navigation foundation
llama.cpp — on-device LLM inference via JNI. Supports any GGUF model.
Kiwix ZIM — offline Wikipedia reader
SQLCipher — encrypted local storage
BLE + WiFi Direct — zero-infrastructure P2P and FieldNotes gossip
ECDSA P-256 — FieldNote signing and author verification

🔒 Security Model

AES-256-GCM encrypted chat storage via SQLCipher (Android Keystore-backed keys)
ECDH P-256 + ChaCha20-Poly1305 for all P2P transfers
ECDSA P-256 signing on all FieldNotes — tamper-evident, verifiable authorship
Duress PIN — triggers configurable data wipe under coercion
Panic Wipe — one-tap destruction of all sensitive data + signing keypair (fresh anonymous identity)
Stealth Mode — hidden from launcher, accessible only via dialer code (*#73784#)
Zero telemetry — no analytics, no crash reporting, no network callbacks
No accounts — no registration, no cloud sync, nothing

Full threat model (user personas, attack scenarios, mitigations): docs/THREAT-MODEL.md

🧩 Planned Modules

Passage — for refugees, border crossers, and people navigating hostile legal environments. Adds: legal rights by country (offline), emergency phrases in 40+ languages, shelter and embassy directories, checkpoint overlays from the FieldNotes mesh, dead man's switch check-in. Built on top of Rushlight's existing offline maps + P2P + LLM — no second install.

Medic — optional clinical knowledge pack for field medical workers. Adds deep drug dosing, WHO tria

Rushlight

Install / Use

README