Peerio – Secure messaging and file sharing

Been using this for a minute, it's quite nice! Kudos to Nadim & team for a friendly and mostly intuitive UI, with some creative new ideas in the context of email/messaging.

A few initial questions:

1. Is any part of the communication forward secure? I can't imagine how the multiparty chat would be.

2. Using the avatar to verify cryptographic identity seems weak, mostly because I don't expect users will check it (it's only in the Contacts view, and it's unclear that it has that use). It resembles the placeholder avatars used on Github among other sites, which seems to suggest that it is not meaningful. So - can the Peerio server silently MITM my communications?

3. I'm not quite sure how the search works (still reading the code), but it seems like it must be searching the plaintext stored in the client's memory. How well will that scale?

The installation procedure apparently snarfs your contacts and spams them to get them to load Peerio. Several observers on Farber's Interesting Persons list have noted that the sign-up procedure is a significant security hole as well as being decidedly unfriendly because of the spam. To track the thread see https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/