[liberationtech] Tox Skype Alternative

[Guido Witmond]

On 03/20/14 16:26, Travis McCrea wrote:
> With all the chat about Telegram, I am wondering about Tox.im. I
> realize it’s still in beta, and they admit themselves that you
> shouldn’t trust them with private conversation yet… but from what I
> understand their whole system is open and they don’t use server side
> software, everything is done in the open.
> 
> Features of Tox: Video Chat Audio Chat Text Chat Public/Private key
> encryption Decentralized
> 
> Encryption used: http://wiki.tox.im/Crypto
> 
> It has a pretty cool looking website, but I know that a cool looking 
> website doesn’t mean it’s secure (see Telegram).


> 
> I don’t work for or on Tox, just a privacy advocate trying to stay
> up with latest communication trends.

Hi Travis,

Many of the Skype, Facebook, WhatApp-altenatives assume that I want to
connect to someone I already know.

In other words, they assume a closed group (of friends) and exclude the
rest (for privacy).

Some projects neglect the way how one can get introduced to a group.
They let people hassle with fingerprints, hashes, emailing keys. Messy.

Other offer a naming service to be able to find your 'friends' and
include them in your group. This creates a huge social graph in the
hands of the operators of the naming service. Selling it to the highest
bidder.


I've come up with a protocol that uses a web site to introduce people to
one another. Due to ubiquitous use of cryptography, each introduction
also distributes a persons' key to the other, validating it is the
correct key. (people will have many, many keys, so more privacy that
handing out an email address).

With these distrubuted keys, people can create networks. Either via one
or more web sites or even peer to peer. Fully encrypted and
authenticated against their identities at sites. This can then be used
to set up encrypted voip/video sessions, like a poor-man's skype.

I call it eccentric authentication.

Check it out at: http://eccentric-authentication.org/

The website look ugly, so the code must be good :-) :-)

Regards, Guido Witmond.