Secure messaging client Bleep now allows for asynchronous chat.
Communicating privately with your friends, coworkers and family isn’t easy as you may think. While sending a “private” message may seem secure, the reality is that message still lives on a server somewhere, remaining vulnerable to third-party infiltration. In the past year alone, we have seen incidents of private photos and corporate emails being hacked and made public. This happens only because there is a honeypot, data stored in the cloud.
As we’ve worked to develop Bleep, one of the biggest hurdles in creating our product is solving the problem of offline messaging. Traditionally, asynchronous offline messaging requires that server to store the message until an offline user comes back online. Without a server, there’s no place to store messages, and no honeypot for the third-party. But it also poses a very obvious challenge for asynchronous messaging.
We created a very basic offline messaging system that allows for a user to send a message to someone who is offline, but both users had to be online to receive that message.
No more. Our latest update to Bleep provides asynchronous offline support. Now, the sender and receiver do not have to be online at the same time for messages to be delivered.
The way we accomplished this is through our DHT. We’ve configured messages in a way that only sender and receiver can receive the content of the message, or know that a message even exists. All messages are end to end encrypted, and Forward Secrecy will be supported in a future release.
As we explore offline messaging with Bleep, it’s important to note that in this version, we cannot guarantee that an offline message will be delivered, as it will likely not last in the DHT more than a few days. The ephemeral nature of the DHT means that these messages are also truly ephemeral. It’s up to the receiver to retrieve messages before they disappear. However, When the sender is back to being online, we will refresh offline messages in DHT if they are not yet delivered. While the chance of a message completely disappearing and becoming undeliverable is very slim, we’re working hard to improve this feature in a future version.
Thank you so much for using Bleep and providing us with the feedback we need to make the product the best it can be. As always, we look forward to hearing from you as we work on our future releases.
Photo: Flickr/David Alexander Elder
