c-toxcore VS simplex-chat

See also this somewhat infamous thread on Tox's cryptographic design[1].

[1]: https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

In case with Tox you have to trust in homebrew crypto that was never properly audited (how about that security issue reported by Donenfeld in 2017, which is being tackled only now, sort of?) -- and outdated and outright abandoned clients which were never above, let's say, "beta quality".

it has the new group chat feature (https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/pull/2269)

"If Tox already does onion routing, why use Tox over Tor?"

What an arbitrary criteria to judge a project by. There have been 5 releases in the past year, including a major feature release.

https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/releases

Signal isn't falling behind and Tox is an old service that has had issues with messages being spoofable since day 1

tox https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

You could use a Tox front end like qTox or Toxic. It is a fully encrypted end-to-end communication protocol that allows text, voice, and video chat. The github page for the Tox protocol has some useful caveats about the its security.

It links to a bug report discussion where one of the developers states that they don't understand the security properties of tox very well[1].

I find that worrying.

[1] https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426

For messaging I'm currently on Olvid (E2E with physical key exchange) but since it still use their servers, I'm currently testing SimpleX where I can host my own servers.

Notice how SimpleX (https://simplex.chat/) has no push notifications by default because of this issue.

I've been using SimpleX [0] with a couple of friends recently. It appears to work as advertised.

[0] https://simplex.chat

If you have a mobile phone number, the domestic intelligence agency knows exactly where you are at all times and any LEO (without a warrant) can also find you. In addition, there have been numerous CCC presentations showing how insecure the global (excluding US) and (separately) US carriers are guilty of promiscuous metadata trafficking ($$) and insecure SS7 setups. As a consequence, for low $, you can go to any one of several shady websites and find the last location of almost any phone number (person unique ID) globally. There are additional varying exploitable vulnerabilities depending on the exact combination of {handset x carrier x country} to impersonate them, tap their line, reveal their exact location, and redirect their phone number through a third-party handset or even a PBX. These are more expensive and some capabilities are forbidden for all but a few selective intelligence uses.

Session (Signal fork) doesn't use phone numbers. It's pretty well-designed overall and uses an onion routing approach. It's already a superset of Signal except it doesn't use phone numbers. https://getsession.org

Also look interesting:

* (unproven) https://www.olvid.io/technology

* (unproven) https://simplex.chat

PS: Using regular TOR on home broadband or cloud servers is relatively risky and inefficient. Sybil attacks on it are common. And to network operators and security agencies it gives an easy "flow tag" of your uplink and exit node data traffic as automatically suspicious.

Why not open up a Feature request on https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/issues