Social Encryption™ ("SE") is a quantum-resistant technology that allows 1:n people to communicate with end-to-end encryption (E2EE) across a network without manually exchanging keys. It does this by replacing network key exchanges with a symmetric key exchange from already known sources of entropy that can be acquired from anything, including passphrases, contents of files/images, or any offline/online source of data. By using shared experiences and knowledge, there is no need to perform traditional network handshakes to exchange shared keys. This symmetric key exchange leaves no network trace, i.e., the network does not know that any data has been exchanged when multiple parties communicate securely in an E2EE fashion.
SE is a "rolling cipher" algorithm, meaning that each entropy line is derived from a separate source and is compounded into the final result, an AES-256 shared key. This final AES-256-bit key is used for E2EE, encrypting all content between parties using AES-256-bit GCM mode. SE keys are identified across the network using a SHA-512 hash derived from an HMAC (hash-based message authentication code). This hash allows parties involved to know which SE key to use for the decryption of content without revealing any of the entropic data and other secrets used to derive the SE keys.
For example, Alice asks Bob if he still has that picture they took last year on holiday. Bob says he does. Then Alice asks if Bob remembers the name of her favorite restaurant. Fortunately for Bob, he does. They both add these items they have/know to Polynom's Social Encryption engine and now they can share fully encrypted messages unique to them alone.