The BitTorrent Engineering team is constantly coming up with ways to make everyday online activities with a distributed infrastructure. One of the greatest challenges in this department has been the development of Bleep, our peer-to-peer chat client. How do you create all of the functions of a full-service chat client without relying on servers — a crucial element to the chat client itself?

Engineer Arvid Norberg has been exploring the intricacies of chat developed within the DHT, and how it pertains to privacy and security, for our engineering blog:

Confidentiality is close to pointless without authentication. If you cannot be certain that you’re talking to the right person, you may be talking to the eavesdropper. The eavesdropper could even talk to the right person and forward your messages to hide his or her presence.

Read more of Arvid’s work here, and get an inside look in how Bleep (now with asynchronous offline messaging) really works.