Comment by rsolva
4 months ago
Other phones with Briar installed can carry your (encrypted) messages, as in a game of whisper. This works best if enough people between you and the recipient had Briar installed ... but most people don't.
But I see how this feature could be very helpful if a state shuts down internet connectivity or during war or a natural catastrophe. The nifty thing is that the app can be shared from one device to another, so you are not dependent on having the app in advance of an emergency.
Ideally, everyone should have this installed as an insurance :)
> This works best if enough people between you and the recipient had [...] installed ... but most people don't.
Which is why it would be nice if operating systems already included such functionality
This is not true, unless you are all in one big fourm or you have a chain of shared blogs. I think they are woried about metadata privacy or people using this to do a DoS.
> Other phones with Briar installed can carry your (encrypted) messages
Sounds like an excellent target for DoS
DoS by local users on local networks? This is that thing where you solve the cryptography problem with the $5 wrench but only slightly different, right?
I haven't looked at the implementation. I was making an off the cuff comment to see if anyone had more information, but yes, ultimately I assume that you could mute an unwanted node with brute force? Or just move further away from it?
I was thinking more you flood the "mail bag" of the "message carrier" and assume the implementation has a LRU eviction policy on said "mail bag".
Someone not participating in briar or the DoS can use fing (android app) or a signal strength meter (handheld, I have 2, personally) to direction find and triangulate the person sending the traffic. Hence $5 lead pipe.
and by "someone" i mean "any android cellphone"