[LINK] itNews: BitTorrent to offer Secure Chat

Roger Clarke Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
Fri Dec 20 08:32:30 AEDT 2013


[Has anyone had a critical look at this?
[ http://engineering.bittorrent.com/2013/12/19/update-on-bittorrent-chat/


BitTorrent readies alpha of secure P2P chat app
Juha Saarinen
itNews
Dec 20, 2013 7:15 AM (1 hour ago)
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/368153,bittorrent-readies-alpha-of-secure-p2p-chat-app.aspx

Private instant messaging mooted.

BitTorrent, the company best known for the eponymous distributed file 
sharing protocol, has intensified work on a decentralised 
peer-to-peer chat app that aims to make it harder for government spy 
agencies to snoop on users' communications.

The server-less chat client was announced in September this year. 
Referring to NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about mass 
government surveillance of phone and Internet users, BitTorrent says 
that events have since made it clear that the company needed to 
devote time and resources to develop a messaging app that protects 
privacy.

Unlike traditional instant messaging systems, BitTorrent Chat will 
not use a central server for authentication of users as well as 
routing and storing their communications. Under that model, 
compromising the central server or eavesdropping on the 
communications to and from it would leave all users of an instant 
messaging service vulnerable to identification and interception.
Instead, BitTorrent Chat makes it possible for users to talk directly 
to each other over an encrypted channel. By using an encrypted 
distributed hash table (DHT), users' BitTorrent chat clients locate 
others by querying neighbours for addresses, until the right peer is 
found. 

Only the person issuing the query knows the address in question, 
BitTorrent says.

An invite-only alpha or early pre-release version of BitTorrent Chat 
is currently being readied by the company along with a new open 
sourced DHT bootstrap server for freshly installed clients that do 
not yet have any peers to communicate with.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916                        http://about.me/roger.clarke
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University



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