Windows/Mac/Linux: Security is naturally a balance between convenience and safety. If you prefer to stay on the safe side of that spectrum, your chats can’t get much more secure than Bitmessage.
While the interface is a bit intimidating to people who are used to things like Hangouts, the app allows you to send encrypted messages over a peer-to-peer network. There’s no central server where your chats are stored, and it won’t be easy to sniff those messages along the way. You can even set up a proxy for your messages to bounce through.
While it’s not the simplest app in the world, it’s great if you have a group of people you need to communicate with and absolutely can’t risk having your messages read.
Bitmessage [via Guiding Tech]
Comments
3 responses to “Bitmessage Sends Secure, Encrypted, P2P Instant Messages”
This is from the same people who brought you BitSync. I setup a BTSync on a friends computer to their NAS and the first key that it generated showed files that I didn’t recognise. It had generated someone else’s 20 byte long secret key and now I had access to their files.
The FAQ for BTSync says that its ‘virtually impossible’ for the same secret to be automatically generated in two separate instances. This does not guarantee that it’s not impossible.
So, to say that you “absolutely can’t risk having your messages read” is not correct. It all depends on a random generated amount of characters and the likelihood is unlikely but there is still a chance.
if true, that is quite startling – a 20-byte long secret key (generated from either /dev/random or CryptoAPI) should have such an impossibly low chance of re-use it’ll never happen.
It’s much more likely to be an implementation issue of some kind, but I’m not enough of an expert to guess exactly where. If you kept a copy of that first key, it could be worth contacting the guys at bittorrent.
I’ll stick to Brosix thanks.
It’s Russian, so is unlikely to have any NSA hooks in it. It’s sad when one is the stage of trusting Russian and Chinese programs and equipment more than Western stuff as the backdoors, exploits and hooks are likely to be less intrusive. >.