simplex-chat VS termpair

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

A counter to this would be to let users deploy their open source client [0] themselves to wherever (as one example, this is something that TermPair implements [1]).

[0] https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients

[1] https://github.com/cs01/termpair/#static-hosting

TermPair: Terminal sharing with AES-GCM 128 bit end-to-end encryption\ (34 comments)

From a quick skim it looks like the key is base64 encoded into the URL in terminal_id param, so presumably you just share the URL and the collaborator stays on the URL with the key? If the key is ephemeral/regenerated for each session it seems to eliminate most of your concerns.

https://github.com/cs01/termpair/blob/1d273fa306a543fefbf2cf...

This looks pretty similar to the few years old TermPair [0], featuring AES-GCM 128 bit end-to-end encryption and built with FastApi (Python).

[0] https://github.com/cs01/termpair