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Comment by moxie | Hacker News Reader

I help develop TextSecure, an Android app which allows users encrypt their text messages: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...

It's fully open source: https://github.com/whispersystems/textsecure

You can also sign up to be notified when it's released for iOS: https://whispersystems.org/blog/iphone-rsn/

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I love textsecure. My problems is twofold: I don't know in advance who is using it from my contacts, and I know for sure none of my non geek relations is using it, not even for business stuff, which could make sense. And so as much as I like it (thanks!!!) I am not convinced this is the solution. Am I wrong ?

As I understand, you can use Textsecure as your default SMS app which means it will automatically send either a plain or encrypted message to a recipient depending on whether they have the app installed or not.

Of course if you use a non-stock messaging app, like Handcent for instance, you may not want to switch to Textsecure for other features/reasons.

No, you need to initiate a secure session manually, and my experience was that unless you knew the other person was for sure using text secure, this could cause problems, since of you tried to handshake with the other person using a stock app, it could get stuck in the handshake. This was a while ago, so I don't know if the problem still exists.

Text secure is great, though. Really, really great.

Maybe its a Cyanogenmod-only feature then. Because they do claim the app can make the choice transparently without user involvement: https://whispersystems.org/blog/cyanogen-integration/

Wonder how this works: https://whispersystems.org/assets/screens/textsecure_upgrade...

Unfortunately, there are no explanations on webpage and I'm not currently into the mood of reading source code to figure things out.

Maybe outgoing (unencrypted) SMS sent through TextSecure app are tagged as "hey, we can upgrade this to secure comms". Then all you have to do is use the app. But I really don't know.

The current SMS-based version of TextSecure uses whitespace tagging for contact discovery.

The next-gen data-based TextSecure protocol (which is currently deployed in CyanogenMod's WhisperPush implementation of TextSecure, but not yet in the Play Store app) uploads a hashed list of the user's contacts to the server for contact discovery.

https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

Thanks, Moxie! Been using it for a while now, and apart from the odd crash on a memory-starved ancient Droid, I'm happy to report that It Just Works :)

Still trying to convince other people to use, without much luck in non-geek circles :(

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