Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users::The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. A startup called Beeper, which had been working on a multi-platform messaging
Beeper reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users::The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. A startup called Beeper, which had been working on a multi-platform messaging
By that logic, there’s nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it’s closed source. If you don’t want to trust Beeper mini, you’ll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they’re promising to do (and you still won’t know that Apple isn’t scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it’s because I look at what they’re transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren’t going to release the source for their client ever because that’s the only way they make any money.
I tend to trust actual open source projects over closed-source ones. Beeper Mini is closed source. And Beeper is a separate app not really relevant to this discussion.
I assume you’re not using iMessage anyway then because Apple’s Messages stack isn’t open source. If you’re not using iMessage anyway, it shouldn’t matter to you what Beeper Mini is doing. This app isn’t for the ultra paranoid. Neither is Google’s RCS in Google Messages. This is where Signal and Matrix would be better choices. If you are using iMessage on an Apple device, you’re choosing to trust Apple despite their app being closed source and you’re not choosing to trust Beeper, which is fine and I don’t judge you at all for that stance. But at that point, your qualms aren’t simply about Beeper Mini being closed source, the implication is that you don’t trust Beeper as a company and/or its developers which, again, is a valid stance even if it’s one I don’t share.
But I am personally pretty sure I can trust Beeper and Apple enough with my relatively meaningless conversations.
True.
They are a second potential point of failure. Based on their actions, they seem to be pretty ethical, but even if I did fully trust them I would have to acknowledge the addition of a new point of failure. And, of course, people who trusted Apple but not Beeper might not be comfortable with their messages getting relayed through a new third party, etc.
You should read the docs. It’s impressive.
I get where you’re coming from, but after readinhow badly security is implemented in iMessage frankly I trust the Beeper devs more than Apple.
Get this, iMessage delivers the AES encrypted message in a package with the AES key, that package is encrypted with your RSA key.
iMessage lacks forward secrecy. So if anyone ever got your RSA key, they could read all your messages, including past messages, because your RSA key never changes!
I can’t trust Beeper more than Apple on one major technicality… Trusting them requires trusting Apple, at least for now. And I question why I had to sign in to their Mini apps with a Google account.
I’m impressed by the reverse engineering, but hey maybe they could introduce some good encryption on the side for their potentially expanding user base. And probably integrate their two apps… Unless they already basically have.