We all know Signal, Matrix, Telegram, SimpleX, etc… But if you can’t access the internet you can’t communicate. Pretty logic. But would it be possible, at least theoretically, to create an app that permits to message people even if the internet goes down?
It might be a dumb question I really have no idea to be honest.
It’s not p2p but at least many years ago:
SMS.
If the Internet outage is local then the towers would still work and you’d be able to get texts. I went through a few storms where wired home internet was down, the towers weren’t giving me a data connection (no mobile web browsing or anything), but I was able to send and receive texts.
If you really care about what you’re asking after, do what someone else said and get a radio license. It’s 150 year old technology and every time something happens radio operators pop up some kind of emergency communications or bridge to the internet through repeaters or something.
Briar or meshtastic
Telegram isn’t P2P and isn’t recommended. Signal is good, but not P2P. Matrix is decentralized, not P2P. SimpleX is P2P, I think, but not sure.
Simplex uses Severs, you can bring your own one, but it is not peer to peer when talking about direct communication to the recipient
SimpleX uses onion links
positive-intentions is a decentralised P2P chat app. https://positive-intentions.com/
Yea but there are android versions too. Its to send files over WiFi direct phone to phone with no network but some also have chat.
Oh interesting! I’ll take a look into it thanks.
yggmail is a fairly obscure and experimental take on email on a mesh network: https://github.com/neilalexander/yggmail
Would this work through something like meshtastic?
yggmail specifically, probably not. yggdrasil uses TCP/IP and the Meshtastic latencies to perform connections would be too high AFAIK. It would probably only work in a fairly well-connected network. yggdrasil could be used directly over a WiFi protocol but it would need fairly good reception to function.
N.B. I haven’texperimented with this myself.
This was a common thing that was developed for the international protests after Arab Spring, which would frequently have their Internet shut down as a State tactic to prevent communication amongst protestors.
Mesh net chat apps like FireChat were born in response
@Ju135 Briar over WiFi or Bluetooth.
Surprised nobody mentioned scuttlebutt yet https://scuttlebutt.nz/
SSB can use the internet to share encrypted messages via hubs/servers, but it also can share the same messages peer to peer in a mesh sort of setup without the internet using a ‘gossip’ protocol within a local network. It was invented by a sailor who was regularly away from WiFi due to being at sea.
Isn’t this what airdrop was?
Briar (Android Only) - Uses Bluetooth, Wifi, or Internet via Tor to communicate. You can theretically create a large mesh group with enough users. Think of protests where the government shuts down the internet. Downside is, bluetooth range is 10 meters 😓.
Also: You can send encrypted text over SMS using Secure Space Encryptor (SSE) (known as Paranoia Text Encryption on iOS). It’s an Open Source app that can encrypt text.
- Type text
- Copy the Ciphertext
- Send and tell the recipient to use SSE fo decrypt.
You both have to share a password/passphrase over a secure channel, then use that to encrypt and decrypt.
Or PGP (there are mobile apps), but they aren’t quantum resistant. If someone intercept and stores them, it could be decrypted later. So I recomment Symmetric Encryption like AES 256 (so use SSE for better security, since they use AES 256)
You can also encrypt a radio:
Rattlegram is an app on iOS/Android that alllows converting text to audio and play it over your phone’s speaker.
As mentioned before, SSE.
- Use SSE to encrypt text
- Copy-Paste the Ciphertext to Rattlegram
- Sent it over the radio
- On the other end, use Raddlegram to turn the audio back to the ciphertext
- Use SSE to decrypt.
Voila! Off-Grid Encrypted communications.
Warning: Encryption over Ham Radio bands is illegal in many countries 😉 (but fuck the law lol, who cares)
There’s also Meshtastic, but it has much shorter range, but, in the USA at least, they aren’t “Ham Radio” so they (supposedly) can be encrypted legally.
scratch telegram off that list, but Session messenger there instead.
Telegram isn’t private, one guy has the master key to the whole thing
Yeah to be honest I don’t even know how telegram became so popular in the “privacy-oriented world”
I mean this is a terrible answer, but DS pictochat fits that
pictochat FTW
No joke, I was talking about this recently. I feel like niche groups (me included) are just going full-circle back to the DS days
I found Berty yesterday just after making this post. But as a neophyte in cryptography and everything, how am I supposed to know which one is better for my privacy ? (e.g. between Briar and Berty) Because right now the only thing that I have is what the apps are “telling” me so… Yeah I don’t know how to chose.
Honestly if you don’t want to think too much about it, go with Briar, it’s way more battle tested, while Berty seems like it hasn’t seen much adoption since it’s younger, both have a bit of development activity I saw, so I can’t say if one is more or less maintained than the other
As for the actual question of gauging which has the better cryptographical implementation, I don’t know either, beside the most surface level information I know very little.
I believe if you want to look into it, you’ll have to start from their whitepapers
Woah Briar is really cool. I think this is like what I want Signal to be.
