Quote from: RodeoX on July 22, 2015, 05:25:25 PM

You want SureSpot. End to end encryption, full deletion permissions, and open source. Wink

https://www.surespot.me/

It's free, but the author has a bitcoin address in the app for tipping!

It's better than Bleep, I guess, but marginally (open source, with a similar number of downloads in stores).

Quote from: nachoig on July 22, 2015, 09:50:35 PM

Quote from: hodlbananas on July 20, 2015, 09:32:00 PM

The only messenger from this category that is relatively free from the problems of both convenience and popularity, is Telegram, which has all the features that you expect from a regular app and, I'd say, is somewhere in between underground and mainstream at the moment. It also has a special feature - secret chats, that is specifically tailored for secure conversations.

Ultimately, Telegram may very well be the best option at the current moment, but as its userbase grows, it can attract more attention from the government agencies, and ultimately suffer the same fate as Skype and FB - its encryption may be end-to-end, but the app itself isn't peer-to-peer, which means that it has centralized servers and people running those servers. And where there are people in charge, one cannot be 100% sure about their incorruptibility. Its another, although less grievous problem, is hazy monetary policy: currently they are running on investors' (Durov's, mainly) money, and they don't have plans for paid features, so it's not entirely clear as to what they're gonna do when the pot runs out. But again, this is a much, much lesser problem, compared to the security vulnerabilities associated with centralization.

I have bad news for you. The cryptograph used in Telegram isn't considered good.
http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/a-264-attack-on-telegram-and-why-a-super-villain-doesnt-need-it-to-read-your-telegram-chats.html
http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/
http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-back-we-know-maths/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6913456

And end-to-end encryption needs to be the default (which doesn't happen in Telegram), otherwise, no one will use it. Although their end-to-end encryption shouldn't be trusted anyway.

Quote from: hodlbananas on July 22, 2015, 01:50:09 PM

Quote from: misterycoins on July 22, 2015, 12:00:44 PM

OTR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging
Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) is a cryptographic protocol that provides encryption for instant messaging conversations.

This is nice, never heard of it. Found a report about some security vulnerabilities found by the EFF and less-then-optimal battery usage by the Diffie-Hellman protocol, but overall it seems legit. Have you been using any of its mobile implementations yourself?

OTR is good, but not for mobile. You and your contact need to stay online all the time because it doesn't work with offline messages. Also, it doesn't work with group messaging.

Well, like I said, I don't trust Telegram to be 100% secure, nor anyone should, since it's not p2p, but it's the best option out there, as far as popularity/security ratio goes, in my opinion. And I can also force end-to-end encryption on those I communicate with by starting secret conversations myself.

Anyway, I'm not a fanboy of Telegram and will gladly switch to a better alternative, when it appears on the market, but for now I don't see a more secure option, which won't leave me unable to communicate with my network of contacts, due to them not caring enough to download Bleep or SureSpot.

hodlbananas

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