Briar: Peer to Peer Encrypted Messaging
briarproject.org
briarproject.org
I like the built in Bridge option as well, (when the app communicates over the internet) to help avoid revealing the traffic is Tor traffic.
I have been impressed by the range of Briar- with a clear line of site, easily hundreds and hundreds of feet- i tested it to well over 500 outside- and on the plane , my family was scattered, but that was no issue at all. (More recently though i've detected my own Bluetooth MotoTag trackers from my luggage in Cargo holds while on planes, so Bluetooth indeed works well on planes.)
-I have heard of but have never used BridgeFy, which I know was a well known famous Bluetooth app that competed with Briar in the past. To my understanding it isn't quite as secure or open source.
There is a informative post here https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_... where a developer noted Briar's capabilities at that time- it seems due to some changes on the OS/phone Hardware end, and whatnot- and due to the phones only passing messages to contact nearby - Briar is not a true mesh networking app. It is a shame- i feel a true Bluetooth mesh networking app would be unstoppable in availability -though it might be a bit of a battery drain.
It is a shame Briar isn't on iOS also -
I also wish Signal would eventually consider communicating over any medium accessible- they would probably run into similar issue Briar has.
What will it take to get a Peer-to-Peer capable Bluetooth/Wifi/Celluar network using/(more possibly in the future)- proper optional mesh networking, Tor capable, VPN friendly, wholly end to end encrypted ,perfect forward secrecy including, fully open source App providing messaging (with the 'accounts' that Briar uses?), for Android and ios?(And Let's throw in PC Mac and Linux, so laptops could have a extremely user friendly user accessible way of doing this as well.)
Better yet, add Calling capability- i don't know how rough doing video calls would be over some methods like modern day Bluetooth- but even a rough capability would be used a little and be worth adding to the collection of things one could do(Briar is only Messaging at the time of this post- which is something notable for sure,as very few apps let you transmit solely thru Bluetooth<I have not heavily looked into the shared Wifi communication abilities of Briar at this point in time> - but more could be added in some form...I observe apps do exist that allow for Bluetooth calling or act like "Bluetooth" Walkie Talkies)
500 feet outside was the test i did with a clear sightline- the inside of the plane was not quite as far, but the messages did go through - and we couldn't have passed the phone around when one family member was 5 seats behind me, the next was about 20 rows in front of me
Never had it stopped by iOS. So not only there's no fundamental restriction, the App Store itself allows some apps to do that.
But the point is - there's no fundamental restriction from the OS itself.
Whether you want to call it a “restriction”, “a lack of permission without being X type of activity”, or “it works because the app exhibits Y behavior”, it’s all functionally a restriction.
You can run some background activities that are not audio apps, but you’re at the mercy of iOS’s decision to keep your task active or not. If you’re off the charger, all bets are off. iOS’s dev docs make this very clear.
You say that, but then you dedicate a whole paragraph to my potentially (I’m not a native speaker, so it’s very possible) incorrect word usage :)
But also, I took your advice and had a chat with an LLM – seems like it's pretty much in agreement with my understanding of the meaning of "fundamental" as a plausible one.
*In the same thread, it is noted that this lack is by choice and special-purpose mechanisms are preferred instead to prevent abuse.
And thats we are different. I would.
Humans have done okay for a hundred thousand years+ without computers, with some dark ages here and there when people get greedy.
The (US) government already has too much access to us, and I think Android is more open to them than iOS. The government has cameras in public and access to our banking data, I’m not gonna protect myself from them by choosing one platform more than the other, or one bank more than the other.
What I don’t want, though, is to be annoyed to death or scammed. My choice is more front loaded by that consideration. If I find out that Apple accedes to backdoors though, I’d have to live without both Android and iOS.
It's safe to assume that every large tech company is spying on everything you do - including Apple. (Remember they're legally required to do so in the UK, and probably in more countries but it only leaked in the UK)
Android is more trustworthy not because of that but because it lets you install apps that haven't been approved by corporate overlords first.
Also, if the market did shift Apple could easily build one. I’m sure they’ve prototyped a few already.
Surely you jest? There’s oodles of reporting on how delicate the flexible screen is. Fingernails can forever leave scratches on it. There’s plenty of reports of people having their screen randomly break despite no noticeable physical damage. Dust/dirt can get in the hinge and cause damage as well, despite advancements in the hinge design. It’s better now of course, but the physical limitations are still there.
I'm a tall adult male. Every other controller is tiny to me.
My max phone size is just about right on the ProMax iPhones. They should be a little smaller - but only a little, like 1-2 mm width. I've got big hands, and I love a big screen.
It would piss me off no end watching videos with a line down the middle.
Also, knowing that every time I bend it, I'm one step closer to the screen failing.
Try it if you dont believe me. Or read any review, they will tell you the same
To try to see another view, though, if the tech is there and not too harmful (that's relative- I think our venture into computer-land is immensely harmful in many ways) and durable enough, it seems nice to protect the screen? Except if grit gets between the glass?
That seems just a hop skip and a jump from having a Bluetooth WPAN/WLAN that lets many phones share one or zero Meshtastic radios but still be able to talk to each other...
> so we could not hop on WiFi and message each other using Signal.
It is like you say: I too wish Signal would allow for communication over any available medium.
I'd like to see more "peer to peer" projects take things this seriously.
But I see how this feature could be very helpful if a state shuts down internet connectivity or during war or a natural catastrophe. The nifty thing is that the app can be shared from one device to another, so you are not dependent on having the app in advance of an emergency.
Ideally, everyone should have this installed as an insurance :)
Sounds like an excellent target for DoS
I was thinking more you flood the "mail bag" of the "message carrier" and assume the implementation has a LRU eviction policy on said "mail bag".
and by "someone" i mean "any android cellphone"
Which is why it would be nice if operating systems already included such functionality
Coming to a country near you soon
This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
Airtags have a totally different architecture than what this protocol is describing, I think.
Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm.
If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed.
It'll have all the routing issues of a Wi-Fi mesh network, except at a vast scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network#Briar
Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth.
How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things?
> This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server.
Nothing about this would work without the Internet.
Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC).
First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds.
Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned).
30,000ft view of how it works: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sece994d0126/...
If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up.
> would need a ttl, say 24 hours
Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.
- Regular travelers between cities (e.g. flight attendants) might be the only reliable links between those hives. Travel patterns change, war breaks out, etc and the hive suddenly splits into two (or more). - A lot of people probably move around too much, and too unpredictable, to participate in a hive that's stable on scales necessary to maintain a TTL of <24h and a reasonable amount of cache for storing others’ undelivered messages.
Maybe I'm being too pessimistic here… I do think it'd be fascinating and instructive to try to build and use a hive/mesh messaging system like this at scale.
The Galapagos Island "post office" is an interesting real world example of serverless/decentralized message delivery: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/galapagos-...
Basically, if you visit the Galapagos and you're so inclined… you leave a letter for someone else, and you sift through the letters that have been left there, and try to find one or two that you could conceivably hand-deliver when you return home.
The latency is 100~1000x longer than "normal" snail mail. This is basically with one "hive" constructed around tourists and researchers in an unusual location. But it basically works.
Could even bring down 4G services while whitelisting POS terminals, keep the Starbuckses up and running.
This sort of thing seemed unthinkable a decade ago, or even in the first Trump admin, but definitely doesn't now.
Other similarly-inclined regimes like Modi in India have proven the effectiveness of targeted Internet shutdowns.
Users get a lot of added utility, "fun", and not to mention a huge upgrade in privacy and security (under local settings), while Signal gets to reduce a lot of data transfer over the network. There's a lot of use cases for local message and file sharing (see thread) and if the goal is to capture as little data as possible about the users, well let's not capture any network traffic when users are in close proximity, right? It's got to be a lot harder to pick up signals that only are available within a local proximity than signals traveling across the internet. The option of expanding to a mesh network can be implemented later[1] but I don't understand how an idea like this doesn't further the stated goals.
The big problem with things like Briar is that you can't install it after the internet has been turned off AND it is already unpopular. But if an existing app with an existing userbase implements even some meshing then this benefits all those users when an event like that happens. Not to mention there's clear utility in day-to-day life.
[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop/37402
[1] I think a mesh network maintains the constraints both Moxie and Meredith have discussed, concerns about ensuring servers are up to data. But then again I'm not sure why that can't be resolved in the same way it is already done where if you let Signal fall too far behind in updates then it will no longer communicate with the servers.
Sideloading an .apk is supported in all Android versions, right? Even without internet access? Is something more needed to install Briar?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/29/firechat-messa...
China went to hard mode to kill the app.
I find it fascinating to read about, but it seems to have a steep and very slippery social hill to climb before the technical parts of the network do anything.
But yes, it had local wifi sync.
Back in 2014 (I believe briar started in 2015) I wrote a realtime P2P application platform. Not only could you send encrypted messages between people, but you can also send files, play games, and write and share programs together, all within the application. The use case for mine is different than briar's.
https://github.com/mempko/firestr
P2P is really fun but also important and I'm happy to see interest in P2P apps coming back!
There's a lot of discussion about alternatives here so I'm going to drop one more: https://cwtch.im
It has wider range of clients and some unique features, like the ability to run multiple, password protected identities trivially, to appear online selectively.
Cwtch – Privacy Preserving Messaging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367012 - March 2025 (21 comments)
Assuming README is among the first files created in a project, here's the date of the first commit for each:
markqvist/Reticulum: Apr 4, 2018
briar/briar: Nov 9, 20152011: https://sourceforge.net/p/briar/mailman/message/27393146/
Timing is the reason.
General purpose systems aren't always ideal, they're just ideal to gain mass adaption. For applications who target smaller sets of users and prioritize security guarantees, being able to fix bugs at any 'layer' and not depend on external entities is crucial. How I'd wish they'd even use their own Layer 2/3 stack if it were practical.
The manual says something about physical networks (is this intended to replace ethernet?) but it also mentions a current throughput of 40mbps so surely that's not what you're supposed to use it for.
It appears to not be a drop-in solution for communication like Briar, so why make a comparison here in the first place?
Instead, it appears to be physical layer-agnostic (it doesn't care if it's run over internet or HAM-radio) infrastructure to build tools on top of. So,
* Is it an end-to-end encrypted overlay network like corporate VPN/Tailscale/Hamachi?
* Is it an end-to-end encrypted protocol between two or more endpoints like SSH?
* Is it an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol between two or more users like OTRv3?
The entire documentation returned zero results for "Tor" or "onion" (routing), so what's the improvement over Briar+Tor?
You can think of Reticulum as a mix of the internet layer and a message-semantics oriented transport layer. Reticulum is focused on trustless, encrypted data transfer with message-oriented semantics suitable for devices with small MTUs.
In current IP-based stacks these are separated at great compromise. First of all, the internet layer is unencrypted. Any actor listening to internet layer traffic can intercept and track or modify IP packets (and indeed this is used for things like NAT.) Secondly, link layers are disparate and fragmentation is used to make sure that IP packets can run atop the link layer. Most modern networking stacks are (UDP|TCP)/(IPv4|IPv6)/(Ethernet|802.11). Ethernet and 802.11 ("WiFi") frames are large enough to comfortably deliver IP packets with minimal fragmentation.
Applications on the internet often send/receive messages but do this at a level above TCP. TCP fragments data atop IP but has stream-oriented semantics. UDP can be used for message-oriented semantics if used very carefully, but UDP packets are delivered with best-effort and UDP packets are often delivered out-of-order or dropped due to congestion and other reasons. There have been several attempts to add message-oriented semantics onto the net. SCTP is in heavy telecom use but seems to be mostly dead in the consumer space. (I recently ran iperf on a recent Linux kernel build and was able to get 8 Gbps on loopback TCP but only 600 Mbits on loopback SCTP. Unsure if I needed to do something different than what iperf does.)
TLS can be layered atop TCP to add security, but that security is only available at the TLS layer and involves trusting Certificate Authorities. QUIC goes atop UDP but also uses the same CA style trust model of TLS. Both QUIC and TLS+TCP are stream-oriented. QUIC has unreliable datagrams which allow message-oriented semantics but this is unreliable. Moreover, all of these protocols rely on delegated authority. Your ISP will give you an IP address that it will route packets for and often this address lives as long as your ISP connection does and will reset when your connection does. If there's NAT involved on IPv4 then you don't even get end-to-end connectivity with your address. Your ISP also has a block of IPs and there's a huge governance structure involved in deciding which entities have which IPs and announcement protocols which announce IP routing tables. Reticulum doesn't rely on delegated authority or governance as much.
Then the other side of the problem is MTUs. Ethernet and 802.11 frames are large enough that IP and TCP can sit atop them well with minimal fragmentation. Fragmentation adds header overhead. However when you get to links like LoRa or TNCs, your MTUs are much smaller. Running IP on these links may be doable but TCP will probably be flooding the link with mostly fragmentation overheat. Reticulum is designed to work better with low MTUs allowing you to bring in links that are associated usually with much higher latency or lower bandwidth such as LoRa or TNC.
For our wold as-it-is, the current state of TCP/IP works fine. ISPs are built out with this model, the governance remains robust, and we rely on utilities to build out the high-MTU links that our comms infrastructure rely on. But if you find yourself dealing with situations with low-MTU, smaller links or low-trust situations, then Reticulum could be of interest. Ad hoc networks are great deployments for Reticulum, for example. There's a lot of innovation going on in this space. See Yggdrassil for a solution with stable-addressing based on key-derived IPv6 addresses and P2P routing which works well when you don't have low-MTU links.
I would invite anybody to explore it for a few hours at least, it is fascinating.
Now the only thing that scare me about it is that it is really a "one man" project [0]. I am not sure why, I do not know if anybody else look or understand what he is doing, but hell it doesn't make me feel confident to rely on it.
- [0] https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/graphs/contributors
In the end, we went back to using DeltaChat.
I mean, if you're not using Tor, your IP and thus identity will leak to the server anyway. So you should probably just use Signal that has double ratchet giving you forward secrecy and break-in key recovery.
Today, PGP's safest use-cases are digital signatures and airgapped comms. But, you'd probably do the latter with TFC as it has much better key/pt exfiltration guarantee.
https://sequoia-pgp.org/talks/2018-08-moving-forward/moving-...
https://sequoia-pgp.gitlab.io/openpgp-dr/openpgp_dr/index.ht...
https://github.com/stealth/opmsg
https://github.com/autocrypt/autocrypt/issues/444
There's a lot going on in the space. It is more innovative than you're giving it credit for, especially around double ratchet. Not there yet, but there's a good reason why I don't mind: control. Multi client support (DeltaChat desktop, hallelujah) and the fact that email remains federation-first.
My identity definitely leaks to my server because I pay it's bill. Not only that, but most of my contacts run their own email or borrow it from me or someone else. Our data does not leave any EU countries apart from the UK. We have IM that doesn't involve any Americans.
Some might imagine we feel terribly smug about that right now :)
Meshtastic is a better option, because it uses LoRa (thus requires additional hardware), but with a good location, many kilometers can be covered and mesh networking extends this a lot further. Meshcore is supposedly the next "generation" of meshtastic, but not popular enough over here to actually test it.
I just noticed there is no IOS version? bit strange no?
also no update on their blog since 2023?
would be interested to read whats going on recently, is there another place to look?
Honestly given the target audience and the limited dev resources I (as an iOS user) do think focusing on Android is probably the right choice here.
Development seems to have slowed down a little, which is a shame. There is still no good widespread application for peer-to-peer communication.
In terms of functionality, I miss a "one to many" feature. For activism, disaster management, or even just organising a slightly larger group, it would be immensely useful to have a channel that people can subscribe to (but not write to) and that syncs via trusted contacts, without having to manually reblog everything. Forums are also a bit problematic without moderation and when anyone can invite new users.
- desktop and mobile clients, cross-platform (with an AppImage that installs on old systems)
- end to end encryption
- onion routing, based on the Oxen Service Nodes [0], which also propels Lokinet that allows to anonymously browse the web
- no phone number or email required
- group chats, voice messages, voice and video calls (webRTC), attachments, emojis
https://docs.oxen.io/oxen-docs/about-the-oxen-blockchain/oxe...
Lokinet is tiny compared to Tor's 9229 nodes https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/misc/all.html
The last time I checked, a lot of the nodes are just run in Hetzner's data centers meaning there's not too many actors. I can't even find that list anymore so if anyone has one, I'd like to update my knowledge.
The idea was simple: you can only exchange keys in person, therefore no central server involvement at all.
It used to be the case you could only exchange keys in person, but X25519 was introduced in 2016, and it was bumped to X448 in 2019. You can of course still exchange PSKs as it's currently the only post-quantum key exchange it can offer. QR-codes are not used, instead, imported strings are split into small segments that are typed manually. The program then does what it can do, to help the user identify typos.
Let’s assume they can and you can swap in non standard crypto models to frustrate and vex ‘the adversary.’ (Lol: “the adversary”… religious)
More info, the threat model:
All long-range communication channels (internet, phone network, etc) are comprehensively monitored by the adversary.
The adversary can block, delay, replay and modify traffic on long-range communication channels.
The adversary has a limited ability to monitor short-range communication channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc).
The adversary has a limited ability to block, delay, replay and modify traffic on short-range communication channels.
The adversary can deploy an unlimited number of devices running Briar.
There are some users who can keep their devices secure - those who can’t are considered, for the purposes of the threat model, to be controlled by the adversary.
The adversary has a limited ability to persuade users to trust the adversary’s agents - thus the number of social connections between the adversary’s agents and the rest of the network is limited.
The adversary can’t break standard cryptographic primitivesIt would be interesting to figure out who introduced it. I looked briefly on Google Scholar, and I see it's used in the modern sense as early as Yao (1982), but it might have been used much earlier. It doesn't appear in the Diffie-Hellman (1976) or RSA (1977) papers.
brief bibliography - https://web.archive.org/web/20250316045952/https://pastebin....
>Let’s assume they can
Let's not.
The weak key sizes (<90 bits), broken primitives (SHA-1, MD5, DES), and weak modes of operation (ECB, unauthenticated CBC) are all known.
We know the Grover cuts symmetric key sizes in roughly half, and we know Shor will break classical asymmetric algorithms, so the industry is upping key sizes and moving into hybrid schemes that add post-quantum algorithms.
>non standard crypto models
Here's a thought: Submit your primitive (the rainstorm hash function) into the SHA-4 competition whenever it's due, and win it, or at least become a finalist. Then you don't have to sell it to serious projects as security through obscurity.
Surely you realize Briar is open source so the implementation of your hash function will be available to the attacker, and they can perform cryptanalysis on it to their heart's content? So you can't really get over the fact it needs attention from the professionals.
If you want to be taken seriously, maybe start by improving on attacks over existing algorithms? That distinguishes you from the random cranks who think they've come up with improved schemes.
Sure, you can't put fox to guard the henhouse that's how you get stuff like DUAL_EC. But that's not the case in modern competitions. They are open to the public, and academic in nature. Everyone gets to analyze them.
We don't know who you are, what are your credentials, and we don't have any proof of you showing you have what it takes to analyze current standards, let alone create new primitives resistant to cryptanalysis. Until you decide go the long way, you'll find yourself treated as yet another Crown Sterling.
Even better, it's the general public. Anyone who wants to can publish an analysis at any time, even after the competition ends. If someone published a practical attack against SHA-3 tomorrow the recommended standards would change overnight.
[1]: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/wikis/FAQ#can-i-...
where did you read that it hosts an onion service? i guessed that's how it worked but couldn't find anything in their docs that said so.
Confronting Briar with Disasters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39174518 - Jan 2024 (2 comments)
Briar Mailbox released to improve connectivity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36541798 - June 2023 (11 comments)
Indian government bans 14 messenger apps including Element, Briar and Threema - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35769203 - May 2023 (78 comments)
Briar: Peer-to-Peer Encrypted Messaging - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33686094 - Nov 2022 (141 comments)
Briar Project – Secure messaging, everywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33412171 - Oct 2022 (7 comments)
Briar has been removed from Google Play - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30498924 - Feb 2022 (85 comments)
Briar Desktop for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30023169 - Jan 2022 (84 comments)
Briar 1.4 – Offline sharing, message transfer via SD cards and USB sticks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29227754 - Nov 2021 (110 comments)
Briar Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24031885 - Aug 2020 (185 comments)
Briar and Bramble: A Vision for Decentralized Infrastructure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18027949 - Sept 2018 (11 comments)
Briar Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17888920 - Aug 2018 (10 comments)
Darknet Messenger Briar Releases Beta, Passes Security Audit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825019 - July 2017 (85 comments)
Is Briar really the next step of the crypto messenger evolution? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11690607 - May 2016 (1 comment)
It just cannot be backed up, unfortunately.
[1] In the name of privacy theatre which they have actually been able to defend by spending both on PR and lawyers.
There are benefits to more restrictive operating systems. For example, iOS not allowing apps to run in the background essentially stops any apps with malware from doing stuff in the background, but it also stops apps like Briar, Syncthing, etc, from working well.
I assume Android isn't a problem for most Briar's users. They're likely running a deGoogled Android version (GrapheneOS, LineageOS, etc) and downloading/updating the app via F-Droid or something like that. They don't rely on Google (or Apple) to run anything.
Granted, a few of them are very large/populous like india, bangladesh, pakistan and ethiopia, but in the grand scheme of things iOS is probably more popular than you think.
[0] https://briarproject.org/news/2018-1.0-released-new-funding/
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media
The source code is available here: https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/tree/master
I've occasionally tinkered with building software (but never released said software) that uses encrypted peer-to-peer connections as the _sole_ way of communicating, because it seemed like the most natural way to build said software _and_ the most interesting technically. (And I have zero interest in hosting servers for FOSS side projects.) If I were to actually release one of these projects and it were to become popular, should I expect to be shut down by law enforcement on the grounds that it's already unambiguously illegal? Or would I likely receive a "Technical Assistance Notice" at some point, effectively requiring me to sneak a back door into the software? Or is it actually fine?
I seem to recall all sorts of stories about law enforcement and "TLA agencies" pressuring vendors of secure messaging software to make the software unavailable or to add back doors, including at least one who chose to shut down their business rather than lying to their users about the security of the product. But somehow in all this I failed to glean whether or not it's actually meant to be legal, even on paper.
Tor was funded by the U.S. Department of State. Signal and WhatsApp are end to end encrypted.
Sign up for EFF's mailing list and donate money to them. Check out their Secure Messaging Scorecard: https://www.eff.org/pages/secure-messaging-scorecard
We, as a society, are under constant attacks on our ability to maintain our privacy. As we've seen in large political and technological shifts, it only becomes more important to maintain your privacy. Deep fakes used in scamming relatives is one good example.
Please do release your software and ideas that make information more secure.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/signal_will_withdraw_...
If you think about it, it's more or less the only way this could work in any democratic society.
Encryption is legal in the UK.
But if the government turns up asking for your decryption keys, "you can't have them" is not an option unless you wish to enjoy the luxurious surrounds of a prison cell until you change your mind.
Which, to be fair, is basically the case worldwide, as per the famous XKCD cartoon[1].
If you don’t have they keys, you can’t hand them over, for one thing.
Also, the wrench treatment is extremely unlikely in most democracies. Now, deplatforming such as seizure of DNS names and such, is another matter and varies, often orthogonally to the risk of wrench treatment.
If you prefer ... substitute "wrench treatment" for the democratic wording: "jail time and the associated criminal prosecution process"
We're talking about "if the government turns up asking for your decryption keys, ...".
> Where has this happened?
Pretty much everywhere. Even in the US you can only avoid it if you're careful; if you admit to knowing the keys then you can't. Either way you're dealing with the "criminal prosecution process" as GP pointed out.
The trouble with deniable encryption is its viable use-case is very narrow.
It is, for example, not viable to use deniable encryption when exchanging messages with others.
If the authorities, through whatever means, get the a copy of an encrypted message you sent, and they have done sufficient metadata homework to link it back to you, find your address and come knock on your door, then you are going to seriously struggle with a deniable encryption defence.
Fun fact most Tor exit nodes are in Germany. Hosting those is more risky.
On top of that it runs through servers running who knows what, closed source stuff. So who knows if they're somehow decrypting everything on there before forwarding re-encrypted stuff?