Bleep: anonymity of conversations kicks into high gear!

Behind this name, called Bleep, hides an online messaging system developed by BitTorrent, designed to protect the anonymity of its users as much as possible. The Android app was a mess when it was released. In two months, let’s assess the situation. service improvements. Has the promise been kept?

While extremely attractive on paper, the app released in alpha version suffered from a few minor issues, which prevented it from becoming immediately necessary. happened for example it is impossible to send a message without two users connected at the same time. It was possible to write to someone offline last month, but sending and receiving the message was only possible when both parties were online.

After this, The operation is similar to a classic messaging serviceand a message sent offline will be received as soon as the receiver connects, even if the sender is not there. To achieve this ubiquitous result, the development team had to compete skillfully. Because the message now needs to stay on the networks, which goes against the anonymity principle advocated by the program.

The team leverages DHT or a distributed hash table to obtain this small vulnerability. This is an element known to P2P enthusiasts. For simplicity, this function uses decentralized part of peer-to-peer communication with an encoding applied to the location of the data, here’s a text message. Except for the lack of documentation from the developers (Bleep is not open source), it’s impossible to learn more about the full process.

Among the Bleep projects that have not yet been implemented is the idea of ​​forward secrecy, permanent secrecy. A brilliant idea is hidden behind this concept. In case the data of messages shared between two users is completely captured, forward secrecy makes decryption nearly impossiblebecause a pair of private keys will be used temporarily for each discussion before it is completely destroyed.

• Also to read : How does Bleep protect the privacy of your conversations?

One last question, not least, remains unanswered. How can you trust an app that promises a lot while protecting it? a clear piece of shadow on the cogs of its workings ? It’s up to everyone to try, Bleep is available on the Google Play Store.

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