The Best Encrypted Messengers in 2024
The Best Encrypted Messengers in 2024
I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you mu...
I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you much more “bang for your buck,” things like good passwords, two-factor authentication, and even encrypted email. That said, I still believe that encrypted messaging is a critical part of a well-rounded privacy and security strategy. While the vast majority of our day-to-day conversations may be benign, it can still offer a lot of insight into who we are as people – our routines, likes, and personal thoughts. This information – mundane or not – is worth protecting.
TLDR: Avoid Telegram and WhatsApp. Recommended messengers are Session, Signal, SimpleX and Threema. Honorable mention: Briar.
Session should probably be avoided as well, primarily because they've disabled things like perfect forward secrecy and a few other security measures that probably should not have been disabled.
Session is dead lmfao
That's mentioned in the article I believe. I was just trying to save some people a minute or two. :)
Honorable mention to Matrix as well
Simplex should be the only one around with Briar and Threema being sidekicks
XMPP, for example, does not enable end-to-end encryption by default
Why always these false myths? The most popular XMPP mobile clients do enable it by default.
It was a conscious decision for them not to enforce E2EE by default. https://web.archive.org/web/20211215132539/https://infosec-handbook.eu/articles/xmpp-aitm/
XMPP clients have like 10 different implementations because of that and are not always consistent with each other or even function universally across platforms.
But I'm not an author. That would be @nateb@mastodon.thenewoil.org.
Right? It is a generic protocol for all sorts of communications, some of which don’t require encryption. Yet every modern chat client for human-to-human communication has OMEMO, OTR, & PGP encryption options.
I immediately had my suspicions this article might contain some bullshit when I saw it was published by the new oil...
Why are we still pushing XMPP? It isn't the 90s and I don't feel like learning IRC 2.0.
XMPP is so bad it was the baseline for Whatsapp. You know: that minor platform that feels like IRC and never took off. A lot of the techno around you are old stuff that evolved, "new" techno usually comes with new unexpected issues. Then they mature, get better and... old?
What I like about Matrix so much is that it can be run fully on your own infrastructure, even the TURN server for VOIP, and you can build the clients from source yourself too.
But I agree that it's quite difficult to use. And until now only my dad and my spouse use it with me because they love me and trust me. But they both always have problems with their clients. It randomly logs out and then they have to login with the password and with the encryption key again. For a long time calling didn't work because I misconfigured the server. Then videos were for the longest time uploaded in full size and anything longer than a few seconds would be rejected. The whole spaces thing is implemented very weirdly so it confuses them. And then the threads are even worse so we can't use them because nobody gets how to do it.
Use Simplex Chat instead
The downside with Simplex Chat is that there is no server side accounts
Matrix doesn’t offer disappearing messages (which I consider important for digital minimalism and cybersecurity.
I noticed this in the article and figured I'd throw my 2 cents in. This might be a spicy take, but I actually can't stand apps that do this.
When I was in school I had someone harass me online with threats of violence (they spent a couple of hours insulting and threatening me) then lie to the staff that I was harassing them with even more extreme shit. The staff and other students all took their side until I logged in and showed the conversation. If the messages had disappeared I wouldn't have been able to prove my innocence.
I very firmly want encrypted communications for privacy (I use Signal and Matrix), but I am quite wary of purging communications automatically. That said, it's anyone's right to use services that auto delete and my right not to.
I'm curious what other people's take on this would be.
Deleting messages is still a thing. If there is a message you need to preserve, take a screenshot. If you are worried that someone might think that the screenshot is fake, take a screen recording, or even better, use your phones camera to physically record your screen.
For disappearing messages to work, your conversation partner has to promise they won't take photos of their screen, and they have to promise to use an app that actually implements the feature instead of just pretending to, and the app developers have to promise to have implemented the code to delete a message when the service says it should
Is there actually a cryptographically-sound and physically-complete method for ensuring that a message is only legible for a temporary duration once it leaves your own device and is delivered to someone elses?
Couldn't you have blocked them?
This was almost a decade ago but it was a real life issue extending online, blocking might have made the in person stuff worse. Hard to say, teenagers are awful.
These days I simply don't keep company I don't enjoy so it doesn't become an issue. I also stepped away from posting on social media at all until I recently joined Lemmy and Mastodon.
SimpleX is currently my favourite. Yeah, there are some small concerns, but where aren't they? I hope SimpleX can grow more popular and I'm also waiting for a full-featured desktop client, so it'll be easier to convince people to switch.
The missing unifiedpush feature. I don't need another battery burning messenger.
I hate that simplex is like this.
There is a full-featured desktop client now! What I am waiting for are third-party lighter clients, because the official one is obscenely heavy.
Oh, I didn't know it has a flatpak now. That's cool!
A desktop client that syncs with the mobile client is a must before I can make that switch
I just have a profile on each that are always both in the same groups. IDK about private messaging though.
Simplex=battery eater!
I like Signal, but I really miss multi device support. Same issue with Threema.
Yeah that's a bummer. Signal has multi device support but only for desktop and iPad (yeah, not Android tablets), but you always need to have a master phone device.
It's been an issue for so long, but this is Signal, they do whatever the f they want.
A workaround to have android has secondary device : https://programming.dev/post/5281504
the fact that you like it doesn't make best or even decent in terms of privacy
But in practical usability
It is not like they couldn't support it. Simplex Chat has early support and Session has supported it for a long time.
As always, the problem isnt using a new service or super secure app, the problem is making everyone else I talk to use said app, not happening anytime soon sadly.
encrypted email
Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
In my opinion, it's probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:
- Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there's an "envelope" containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can't be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn't know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
- There's no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
- While not an issue with the protocol itself, it's the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don't stop there of course :p).
- Another thing is the fact that it's incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren't. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
- PGP is... peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don't think that's quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.
This isn't to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
It's just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn't nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I've been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn't much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.
Why do people like Matrix? It's really slow. Even most of the non-Electron clients consume a ton of resources (even more than Electron apps usually do).
Especially Gomuks, by far the worst offender. It consumes nearly a gigabyte of memory and it's a TUI.
I think it more comes down to it not being Discord than people liking it.
Well, it's not privacy-focused.. but I do like Revolt for this purpose. It's performant, looks very similar to Discord, and I think they're adding E2EE eventually.
The issue has historically been with the server. (It was buggy as hell) These days it is much more stable and less prone to collapse.
I don't like Matrix because it gives a option to not encrypt communications. Encryption should be enforced and transparent
Also doesn't force e2ee
Matrix sucks but emojis :3
Sad that Wire wasn't mentioned. I think its the only one that encrypts everything, allows anonymous accounts (no phone number needed!), and has independent clients on all platforms (no mobile app install required, but they have one) that seamlessly syncs messages on all clients
Oh, and its free and open-source.
Check out Session, built on Lokinet, no signups
I loved it but had to let go because too many times messages didn't deliver using different devices, different networks, different recipients. This is over years of trying. I really wanted it to work but sadly that was a big reason to stop trying.
Huh, been using it for years and never had that issue. I do have some people complain about notifications, but not lack of delivery
We've been on simplex for a few months, I like it quite a bit. We made diff accounts for each device and added them all to a group.
Notifications arrive reliably on graphene (no google services), and KDE connect.
I don't love the desktop client and wish I could change text size and scaling. I was able to message the dev about it in simplex and got replies which was cool
I wish Molly was brought up. It is way better than Signal
In what way? I thought it was just an alternative client for Signal.
It is. It's just a bit hardened
Only big difference I noticed is it allowed me to log in on 2 phones simultaneously
As a long time user of Session, it is hard to believe someone would describe it as "user-friendly".
Pretty good read
Thoughts on using TeleGuard?
What about Briar? I know its android only but it looks promising for what it can do.
Good for large groups such as a protest
It's listed as a honorable mention in the article.