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Berty vs Briar
(hackertalks.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Could you give a little more background for someone who’s not familiar with either, please?
I was unfamiliar with those projects too. It seems that these are the private messaging apps: Berty Briar
Those links are correct, sorry for not providing enough context.
The general theme of Briar and Berty that is different then Signal and Telegram is distributed, no central control, no central point that can be killed. So they are designed to be resilient to bad actors. Both programs provide mesh networking, so messages can pass from person to person even without internet (like at a protest, or in a disaster scenario).
Briar is older and more "mature", but very rough around the edges, and only has a android application (no progressive web app here).
Berty is newer, prettier, but uses a different architecture entirely.
There are tradeoffs of using Tor as the main internet backchannel vs IPFS/Peer to peer.
Berty will tell the person your talking to your IP address, so its not anonymous. Which is fine if you know the person, but it does mean anyone observing the network knows who and when you talk to someone.
Briar uses Tor so its much harder to discover, and because of that your IP address isn't known by the person your talking to.
Consider session (which uses the Oxen network, kinda like Tor, but crypto based), its a fork of Signal but they gave up Perfect Forward Secrecy (a hard requirement IMHO for security, otherwise if your key is ever leaked, all your recorded messages can be read.... you have to assume you will be compromised at some point, and reduce the potential area of exposure). In Session since its all cryto-onion network you never know the IP address of the person your talking to.