Since I needed brief intro myself, Wikipedia says:
"The initial target audience for Briar includes "activists, journalists and civil society" with plans to make the system "simple enough to help anyone keep their data safe." As the ability to function in the absence of internet infrastructure may also make the project valuable to disaster response and aid organisations, the developers are working with the Open Humanitarian Initiative and Taarifa. Ultimately, the developers aim to create a system which is "as simple to use as WhatsApp, as secure as PGP, and that keeps working if somebody breaks the Internet.""
Would personally love a blog review or two of Briar but found little thus far.
Do any of these "decentralized" and "end to end" encryption communication systems actually solve the fundamental problem which is that you have to trust the person you're communicating with to not give up the content of the messages they've sent and received. People's telegram and signal comms are always showing up in subpoenas because someone unlocks their phone for the feds. I guess what I'm thinking here is that there's nothing about this that is any better than pgp emails, and i'm not sure i understand why these forms of communication are flourishing when they seem to offer little real protection against a motivated state adversary who doesn't need to attack the system if they can just ask someone for the keys
There is a lot of misunderstandings around messaging systems.
End-to-end encryption is an extremely nice feature as it lets us make the assumption that messages cannot be read by a middle man even if 100% of the employees are corrupt and the messages pass right through FSB and NSAs networks twice.
But, as you point out: for most people this falls flat in most cases once you are up against the big guys and they have decided to get you.
That does not mean that it is useless though: most people won't get approached by these agencies, and E2E-encryption will keep it out of the hands of dragnet surveillance, snooping telecoms providers or FAANG companies and a number of other very realistic scenarios.
(That is unless you use a system that helpfully uploads unencrypted copies of everything you write to a certain large FAANG class company.)
Then there is federation, I guess that is what you mean by decentralized. This is another really sweet property of a messaging system. However, for security it has a number of problems - a little bit less or more depending on exact implementation.
On top of this there is technical execution: Everyones (including me) darling Signal for example has had some pretty nasty problems.
Alltogether it comes down to this if you want to avoid problems: stay out of what trouble you can stay out of and think opsec if you cannot.
And remember that US knew exactly when Soviet started working towards an atomic bomb, because after they started the flow of related research papers stopped ;-)
I.e. opsec is seriously hard if you are up against a powerful entity. Plausible deniability, blending in etc can be just as useful as bulletproof crypto.
> that you have to trust the person you're communicating with to not give up the content of the messages they've sent and received
This has always been the case for any form of communication, verbal or otherwise. You're always trusting that the people you're talking to don't share your conversation if you don't wish it to be shared. This is a inherent to communication, not anything technology can possibly fix.
If you consider this "the" fundamental problem you're (a) underestimating the severity of other problems and (b) wildly overestimating what technology can achieve for humanity.
Trusting other individuals in this world is not a problem that's solvable by messaging protocols. Even literal scifi solutions like Mission Impossible exploding sunglasses inherently trust the recipient of the message not to share data post-self-destruct. Recipient trust is a fundamentally implicit part of deciding to communicate at all, through any medium.
I love PGP, but let's be honest, it's not user friendly in the slightest. It's an esoteric bolt-on to email that requires both ends to want to use it and go through the trouble of setting it up, which basically means that it's really only useful to nerds and people with sufficient requirement for secrecy that they actually go through the trouble.
Services like Signal are great because they're E2EE by default and they're user friendly. We got my tech illiterate mother and stepfather on Signal so they could participate in family group chats. No way she would have been able to navigate GPG.
As for the issue you're bringing up about the endpoint getting compromised, the simple solution is a retention policy (disappearing messages), which Signal has supported for some time now. It doesn't help if the allegiance of owner of that endpoint is flipped (they can simply screenshot future messages), but it does prevent the adversary from getting a full text dump of previous conversations if they swipe the phone for example.
Signal’s primary defense against that is disappearing messages. Beyond that, what can you really do against what is essentially an untrusted endpoint? Education and awareness, and hope that it sticks.
There is a word for "You can't prove I said that", and even though English is my only language, I can't remember the word. It feels like "repudibility". I think I'm on the right track: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/repudiate
I think it is related to forward secrecy.
Maybe the E2EE apps should have a button for that, call it something snazzy like "The 5th Amendment button" and right next to that is a button for trivially forging texts and screenshots with the app's own UI, so that everyone knows that anything can be fake.
As Ben Franklin said, "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." There's no technical solution for that. End-to-end encryption will help if one person sends information to one competent, trustworthy journalist. It won't help much if large groups of people try using it to conspire to overthrow a government: someone will talk, someone will be an undercover double agent.
The defense against that is 'disappearing messages' which is available in most popular E2E messaging apps nowadays, including Signal and WhatsApp.[1]
PGP emails doesn't even have forward secrecy. Emails are not messaging, it needs video/voice calls, stickers/gifs etc etc to have any hope of being adopted by non-techy folks.
The Signal blog has a number of articles on how they develop state-of-the-art privacy preserving features. [2][3][4][5][6].
Also the only info Signal has about you is "Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service", which is what it provides to government requests [7].
Signal has a "Disappearing Messages" feature that deletes conversations contents after a set amount of time. This is the only feature that I'm aware of on these major messenger services that works to solve the concern for your conversations on the recipients devices.
> Do any of these "decentralized" and "end to end" encryption communication systems actually solve the fundamental problem which is that you have to trust the person you're communicating with to not give up the content of the messages they've sent and received.
That's a biology problem, not a digital one.
These systems can't solve that problem, so yeah, you have to trust that person.
A new environment with just a handful of apps comes every so often.
In that regard, what are other apps like Briar?
The premise is:
> Briar is a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server - messages are synchronized directly between the users' devices. If the internet’s down, Briar can sync via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, keeping the information flowing in a crisis. If the internet’s up, Briar can sync via the Tor network, protecting users and their relationships from surveillance
I also assumed it was a window manager or a GUI or something of that nature. They could tweak a few works to make that clear, though. The project looks cool.
What does the YComb community think p2p apps like GNU Jami? I never hear much about it and think it's pretty decent unless someone has good reasons to think otherwise. Thanks
I don't feel comfortable trusting a new "secure" messaging platform or interested in doing the work to dig through the sources to see if it's legit or not combined with the fact that I don't even know if the source they provide generates the same binary they distribute to many.
My experience a few years ago just giving Briar a try for fun was that both parties had to be online at the same time to relay messages (since there's no normal servers) and that it drained my phone battery quickly when I was online. Not practical.
I was thinking it would be nice to be able to run some sort of node under my own control that could buffer those messages. I feel like there was even an option to do that for phones, where someone could help relay messages between two friends, but I could be remembering wrong. At any rate, it would be cool if the desktop app could play this role.
When I tested peer-to-peer messaging a couple of years ago, Briar was the only messenger that was able to sync messages and data without needing a common router. Was very happy to see.
It's great that the messaging works over bluetooth and local wifi, but I really wish the phone app would be able to cache and relay encrypted messages to others.
Or does that somehow work through the posts and forums in the app?
When you're close to someone you can make an initial exchange via QR+bluetooth. When you're distant you need to exchange your briar:// links on a different channel.
Using Tor onion services that get exchanges when adding a contact nearby via WiFi or Bluetooth. If adding over the internet, a rendezvous service will be created.
[+] [-] dingdingdang|4 years ago|reply
"The initial target audience for Briar includes "activists, journalists and civil society" with plans to make the system "simple enough to help anyone keep their data safe." As the ability to function in the absence of internet infrastructure may also make the project valuable to disaster response and aid organisations, the developers are working with the Open Humanitarian Initiative and Taarifa. Ultimately, the developers aim to create a system which is "as simple to use as WhatsApp, as secure as PGP, and that keeps working if somebody breaks the Internet.""
Would personally love a blog review or two of Briar but found little thus far.
[+] [-] leonry|4 years ago|reply
There is also a comparison to other messenger systems on https://www.freie-messenger.de/systemvergleich/. They have a PDF in English available, but it doesn't really tell much.
[+] [-] coldtea|4 years ago|reply
Sounds exactly like a project an agency would help create/infiltrate to tap unto all of the above....
[+] [-] giphyman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mobilemidget|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pulse7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosndo|4 years ago|reply
Well, that doesn’t sound promising at all.
You can ask any cryptographer, they will tell you to not use PGP.
[+] [-] rogers18445|4 years ago|reply
source code: https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im
[+] [-] throwawayair557|4 years ago|reply
https://www.patreon.com/openprivacy
[+] [-] maverick74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] efficax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinkestek|4 years ago|reply
End-to-end encryption is an extremely nice feature as it lets us make the assumption that messages cannot be read by a middle man even if 100% of the employees are corrupt and the messages pass right through FSB and NSAs networks twice.
But, as you point out: for most people this falls flat in most cases once you are up against the big guys and they have decided to get you.
That does not mean that it is useless though: most people won't get approached by these agencies, and E2E-encryption will keep it out of the hands of dragnet surveillance, snooping telecoms providers or FAANG companies and a number of other very realistic scenarios.
(That is unless you use a system that helpfully uploads unencrypted copies of everything you write to a certain large FAANG class company.)
Then there is federation, I guess that is what you mean by decentralized. This is another really sweet property of a messaging system. However, for security it has a number of problems - a little bit less or more depending on exact implementation.
On top of this there is technical execution: Everyones (including me) darling Signal for example has had some pretty nasty problems.
Alltogether it comes down to this if you want to avoid problems: stay out of what trouble you can stay out of and think opsec if you cannot.
And remember that US knew exactly when Soviet started working towards an atomic bomb, because after they started the flow of related research papers stopped ;-)
I.e. opsec is seriously hard if you are up against a powerful entity. Plausible deniability, blending in etc can be just as useful as bulletproof crypto.
[+] [-] ben-schaaf|4 years ago|reply
This has always been the case for any form of communication, verbal or otherwise. You're always trusting that the people you're talking to don't share your conversation if you don't wish it to be shared. This is a inherent to communication, not anything technology can possibly fix.
[+] [-] lucideer|4 years ago|reply
If you consider this "the" fundamental problem you're (a) underestimating the severity of other problems and (b) wildly overestimating what technology can achieve for humanity.
Trusting other individuals in this world is not a problem that's solvable by messaging protocols. Even literal scifi solutions like Mission Impossible exploding sunglasses inherently trust the recipient of the message not to share data post-self-destruct. Recipient trust is a fundamentally implicit part of deciding to communicate at all, through any medium.
[+] [-] Sanzig|4 years ago|reply
Services like Signal are great because they're E2EE by default and they're user friendly. We got my tech illiterate mother and stepfather on Signal so they could participate in family group chats. No way she would have been able to navigate GPG.
As for the issue you're bringing up about the endpoint getting compromised, the simple solution is a retention policy (disappearing messages), which Signal has supported for some time now. It doesn't help if the allegiance of owner of that endpoint is flipped (they can simply screenshot future messages), but it does prevent the adversary from getting a full text dump of previous conversations if they swipe the phone for example.
[+] [-] tapoxi|4 years ago|reply
iMessage isn't an option because half of the family is on Android.
If a motivated state actor wants pictures of my baby niece then I guess they're welcome to it.
[+] [-] anjbe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReactiveJelly|4 years ago|reply
I think it is related to forward secrecy.
Maybe the E2EE apps should have a button for that, call it something snazzy like "The 5th Amendment button" and right next to that is a button for trivially forging texts and screenshots with the app's own UI, so that everyone knows that anything can be fake.
[+] [-] not2b|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayair557|4 years ago|reply
PGP emails doesn't even have forward secrecy. Emails are not messaging, it needs video/voice calls, stickers/gifs etc etc to have any hope of being adopted by non-techy folks.
The Signal blog has a number of articles on how they develop state-of-the-art privacy preserving features. [2][3][4][5][6].
Also the only info Signal has about you is "Unix timestamps for when each account was created and the date that each account last connected to the Signal service", which is what it provides to government requests [7].
[1] Disappearing messages
https://signal.org/blog/disappearing-by-default/
[2] How to build large-scale end-to-end encrypted group video calls:
https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/
[3] Signal and GIFs
https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/
https://signal.org/blog/signal-and-giphy-update/
[4] Signal groups,
https://signal.org/blog/signal-private-group-system/
[5] Sealed sender
https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
[6] Private contact discovery
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
[7] Government requests
https://signal.org/bigbrother/
[+] [-] ElevenFingers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|4 years ago|reply
If the counterpart can see something with their own eyes (or a screenshot) then how would you even expect to protect against this?
[+] [-] lkxijlewlf|4 years ago|reply
That's a biology problem, not a digital one.
These systems can't solve that problem, so yeah, you have to trust that person.
[+] [-] Dylan16807|4 years ago|reply
But beyond that, good secure messaging protocols are designed so the recipient can verify you sent a message but not prove that to anyone else.
And they also make it so a compromise of your private key can't be used to decrypt old messages.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l30n4da5|4 years ago|reply
It took me longer than I care to admit before I realized Briar is just a messaging app.
[+] [-] forgetfulness|4 years ago|reply
In that regard, what are other apps like Briar?
The premise is:
> Briar is a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server - messages are synchronized directly between the users' devices. If the internet’s down, Briar can sync via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, keeping the information flowing in a crisis. If the internet’s up, Briar can sync via the Tor network, protecting users and their relationships from surveillance
[+] [-] dmitryminkovsky|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] irfwashere|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddtaylor|4 years ago|reply
Just use Matrix instead.
[+] [-] joshuaissac|4 years ago|reply
Disclosure: I was an intern for them in mid-2012.
[+] [-] sprash|4 years ago|reply
No just don't. Matrix exposes metadata to every connected server.
[+] [-] mab122|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyist5eva|4 years ago|reply
builds are reproducible
[+] [-] orblivion|4 years ago|reply
I was thinking it would be nice to be able to run some sort of node under my own control that could buffer those messages. I feel like there was even an option to do that for phones, where someone could help relay messages between two friends, but I could be remembering wrong. At any rate, it would be cool if the desktop app could play this role.
[+] [-] giphyman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedahan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] only4here|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bubersson|4 years ago|reply
Or does that somehow work through the posts and forums in the app?
[+] [-] tekknolagi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l-albertovich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PhilKunz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebkur|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grote|4 years ago|reply