" Although it is very nice that people are working on creating secure and anonymous messaging systems, I am afraid that BitMessage is weak to a variety of attacks. I fear that the people working on it do not have sufficient expertise, in the fields of security and anonymity, to design and implement a proper cryptographic communications system + anonymity network. After reading the two design .pdf documents, I have identified a variety of weaknesses and overall poor design choices in the BitMessage protocol. "
And he continues to show those weaknesses.
Until bitmessage is thoroughly reviewed by serious people ,and results are displayed in a prominent place, it would be hard to trust.
From the homepage: Bitmessage is in need of an independent audit to verify its security.
There was also someone who deanonimized bitmessage. They should link this too in a prominent place.
If they solved any of those problems , they should link to solutions and a possible review.
FTFY
no. the same message does "never" encrypt to the same cypher:
$ echo lol | gpg -e -r F8669BB7 --armor
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
hQEMA2gTLr1USDZGAQf/YbbnzHvNfdqbs6hmdmIaaiZOSfW9P6Bc8tdF4MG/JbP+
RTxbLpi4W+vXs+WrD9jdik8KuDdZV54O1mb6Ido3xrYeEPBo0Vje2eVpgUy01VUa
2RM76NvsX1VN9rap6KvHuO/h7IFwDuAtvUUcDyFH+qK2UEHordFi+mWKqICocQt0
WWgpCk5BVgM/1q2c2ruWxVuZs/IMh9LQGZ1i7hpkJHAYqovhghROmGarUuJYXGDi
s6rSMpjxbXDhPMYbbhbBI4pRhgKtN2FMlKyI3XoH+LCFHsOyBmazroVYWFu+gafH
6LU2Z65OQyJWqX5CLdwab4qpUQdht6lqkUHRJB9xdtI/AfTFF7BbRP8PR+q9GVAe
r4I812VmBn3hwBHJzNiFDEGVkt/IDpd6M/X2Vi0xJx0LUaICL+swPVudenPuvlnt
=zeUd
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
$ echo lol | gpg -e -r F8669BB7 --armor
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
hQEMA2gTLr1USDZGAQgAo4ZEHGWKSgwVmbC7crACvTXVtlgP4n8J/3oSohct9zrM
SqPd4L5TWsjOh+2LlG7WQbPnpn4Tcv9c4RyPNb+1C/fWRmGhV+a3QhuC+rrus5c6
/FPwsHTjO30N0AnCMzoXAaqDRRGw859BKazEZyxIHherU+o7wNRKrW6U1ikRd/Pu
BwHChUZHBRmZhomrtYPbQ5cNAJQtPMj94Z8OuZeCEzPNBr3opevoMs2j+9ysOtkF
7Cam3jTKLM3GwHSm4c7WzhdJJsXbnOn8ODYRBf++4oJChPIqeT2EssigAQuuhHlk
pDhM40zB7hAd6MJM52cZpM3UqTe/iI4vHSrQ+pw/otI/AWY6s4aIlF5AAzoM0wAR
FzobJ5Vbp7fBgA1SiOhEhSAdT/U2yy2jQcQN53yyX9Vqtunh3dNmCGaNNavszK8+
=YDLc
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
$ hQEMA2gTLr1USDZGAQ
edit: It's not encrypted with the primary key, but one of the subkeys.
PS: i think asymmetric crypto is secure from such attacks anyways, though isn't that way slower than symmetric crypto?
I'm happy to see the surge of interest and new projects, but most of the offerings are between embarrassing and pathetic. Either the concept is being exploited for marketing purposes, the individuals involved just aren't appropriately skilled at what they are doing, or there are actual nefarious purposes. (I would agree, Bitmessage, and similar schemes could prove to be the best of the bunch.)
One could respond this is just paranoia, secure software doesn't really need to be open source. Or, we should trust someone because they did something very good in their past. What the NSA leak showed us is that paranoia is real.
Politics aside, and I've said this here before, this isn't just an issue of the NSA. For 99%+ of individuals, what the NSA is doing isn't going to damage them personally. However, those techniques damn well can. What the NSA is doing, other intelligence services are doing too. In some circumstances private companies are doing it as well. It doesn't matter if you aren't a terrorist, if you work on anything that could be very interesting or very profitable you are at a real risk of being targeted for electronic spying.
Standards need to be established:
a) If its closed source, it can not be audited and thus can be considered neither secure or insecure.
b) If it forces automated updates, it can not be secure.
c) If it runs on a leaky platform (all mobile devices so far) it can not be secure.
That should tell us, in my opinion, that the number one goal of secure chat would be a secure mobile platform -- that includes both operating system and hardware. If you take a look at the fine print on Replicant, the fully free version of Android, you'll notice nearly every supported phone has major potential holes, save for one really ugly looking thing.
Not sure if bittorrent chat will be very interesting. Most secure chat clients encrypt on the client side so the server won't be able to read your messages, so not sure if not having a server is that big of a win here. I'm also guessing metadata would be exposed to various people on the bittorrent chat p2p net.
The one I'm most excited about right now is bitmessage. It is the only chat protocol that I feel is really revolutionary. It is also a p2p network, but the interesting thing about it is that everyone on the network gets every message ( obviously you have to have the correct keys to decrypt the messages that were meant for you ). So its impossible for an observer to tell even who is talking to who. Also they have the concept of public chans , which I think are a good mechanism to draw users. Bittorrent could do the same thing here.