session-desktop VS tfc

https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios

This is the correct place to raise feature requests and bug reports: https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/issues

We're at 1.10.8. Please update: https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/releases

Session's reasoning seems much more... cagey. Telling people to recreate their identities themselves sounds a little like the Threema stopgap solution, but it's much sloppier (I can't imagine end users WANT to recreate their account and communicate this to all their contacts via a third party). They're talking about implementing this eventually, but the ticket for doing so was closed right after saying this.

Session F-Droid (version 1.15.4): Encrypted private messenger

Or Briar, Session, Tox, Element/Matrix, Jami...

>No e2ee app has compromised device part of their threat model.

Oh really, here's one I made earlier https://github.com/maqp/tfc :-)

>The whole OS can.

So how are you backdooring a bash script that comments out lines of code from Linux source before compiling it?

You lying to policy makers with "it can be done" mindset sound like a stupid con that burns a lot of money and time in the process.

But as I said, it is way easier to install Pegasus on your phone or to grab / steal the unlocked phone from your hand, than break any of these. If you want absolute privacy, you should think about your physical security, and the trustworthiness of your devices before choosing the right chat app. Check the Tinfoil Chat for more information.

TFC

There is software that lives up to these claims, it's Tinfoil Chat. The article is correct about the necessary trade-offs: due to peer to peer transport (onion hidden service 2 onion hidden service) both ends of the conversation have to be online -- it at least spools the message waiting for the recipient to appear.

For hole punching and signaling that has to be done by third party, well, the third party is TOR

TFC then goes on to break out the encryption and decryption machines from the network and passes messaging over opto-couplers to prevent your keys from getting exfiltrated. Qubes qrexec could similarly isolate the components.

https://github.com/maqp/tfc

> If you want maximum security use an air gapped computer. But that won't let you send messages on the go.

You can, with some inconvenience, use optical diodes to transmit data from a trusted input device to an untrusted network device for transport over tor, and then push the received messages over a second diode to a display device that decrypts the messages, so that even if you receive an exploit/malware, there is no physical connection that allows unencrypted data to be exfiltrated.

https://github.com/maqp/tfc

Briar is one of the most important secure messaging projects currently. Not only does it remove the need to trust the vendor about content (like with all E2EE messaging apps), you also get to keep the metadata about communication to yourself as data transits from one Tor Onion Service to another.

The downside is of course, you need to keep the endpoint powered on when you want to be reachable so it will increase the battery drain on your phone.

Note: There's also a desktop client if that's easier to keep online https://briarproject.org/download-briar-desktop/

One extremely important thing Briar is doing, is it's using the P2P as means to host alternative social interaction formats, like forums and blogs. Similar to Signal/WhatsApp stories (which is somewhat similar to microblogs/FB wall), it's a way to indirectly share information. You could pretty much emulate any social media platform on top of E2EE protocol with ~zero infrastructure cost and without having to worry about data mining. I'd argue what Briar's innovating on here is one of the most important aspects in what's left for secure messaging.

Finally a small caveat: Briar will share your Bluetooth MAC address with all peers so it can automatically use that when you're in close proximity with your peer. Thus sharing your Briar ID publicly is not a good idea for two reasons:

1) major global adversaries may have access to that information (e.g. if Google aggregates it) which can deanonymize your account. This also allows slightly technical person to confirm identity of briar account if they suspect it's you (a bit wonky threat model but still).

2) it ties everything you do across your accounts on same device together, so there's strong linkability even if you rotate the identity key by reinstalling the app.

Briar is pretty clear about this in it's FAQ, but it's still not very well known although it definitely should be.

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That being said, if you want similar Onion Service based communication with no such linkability, there's https://cwtch.im/ which is a fantastic project.

There's also https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/

Both are spiritual successors to John Brooks' `Ricochet` application.

You can also chat and share files (among other things) with https://onionshare.org/

(And finally, you can get remote exfiltration security for keys/plaintexts with TFC https://github.com/maqp/tfc (my personal work), at the cost of losing some features like message forwarding etc that the architecture prevents you from doing.)