14 DAY TRIAL // BitTorrent has been talking about its desire to help people protect their online privacy for a while now, and the plans are finally taking shape. BitTorrent Bleep is a serverless, fully encrypted chat client that allows users to communicate via text or voice.
The idea of providing people with a way to communicate safely, away from the prying eyes of an agency such as the NSA has been gaining traction in recent months, following Edward Snowden’s revelations. While BitTorrent may not be the only one to try offering such a service, the company did come up with an idea that gives it an edge.
“Many messaging apps advertising privacy and security by offering end-to-end encryption for messages. But when it comes to handling metadata, they are still leaving their users exposed. We reimagined how modern messaging should work. Our platform enables us to offer features in Bleep that are unique and meaningfully different from what is currently available,” BitTorrent’s Farid Fadaie said.
He explains that with Bleep there is no central repository of metadata. BitTorrent doesn’t track or store information on who is communicating with whom, or when communications happen. Unlike other services, Bleep doesn’t even do this temporarily only to delete it later. “We never have the metadata in the first place,” Fadaie says.
There’s also no central lookup, which means BitTorrent doesn’t track or store who is looking for whom.
Lastly, all links are encrypted. “We are using secure encryption protocols such as curve25519, ed25519, salsa20, poly1305, and others. Links between nodes are encrypted. All communication is end to end encrypted. This should be the new normal in the post-Snowden era,” the company notes, adding that BitTorrent Bleep is the next step in creating an open Internet, powered by people.
BitTorrent Bleep’s architecture has two main components. The first one is the peer-to-peer platform for communications, which works as a fully distributed Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) server that serves as an engine for Bleep.
There’s also the user interface, a chat and voice application, which is an enhanced SIP compliant client with additional functionalities.
The app is only in the development stages right now, and people can sign up to be part of the pre-Alpha testing process. So far, the tool only works with Windows 7 and 8, but support for other operating systems, as well as mobile platforms, will be covered in the future as the app grows.
In order to use Bleep, users can provide an email account or a mobile phone number, but there’s also an incognito model that doesn’t require people to provide any personal details.
