Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-UlA4-tslROBDS9IqHalWVztqZo7uxlCeKPQ-8uoFOU/edit

by lrvick • 8 years ago

300 236 8 years ago

docs.google.com

proaralyst2• 8 years ago

I would like to use Riot/Matrix but its UI (at least on Android) is terrible. I can't convince non-technical friends & family to switch.

Part of the problem is the inability to assign nicknames to contacts, so you have to remember everyone's Matrix ID.

secfirstmd• 8 years ago

Yes. I think it's brilliant but the UI/UX needs a big update. Also from a techie point of view it's cool but from a normal user, there are too many options in group chats. Esp when people change phones etc.

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

Not just the UI but it's still rough around the edges in some cases. I ran into a couple bugs, I realize now I shoulda reported / researched further into, but my use for it is minimalist.

electrograv2• 8 years ago

For me, the problem is how incredibly slow Riot is (and every other client I've tried has almost unusable bad UI, sometimes in combination with being slow).

IMO: Text chat with a few emojis and images here and there should not ever be among the things that slows your computer to a crawl.

EDIT: I'm speaking of the UI, not the network connection; the latter is sometimes slow too, but that's understandable

ATsch• 8 years ago

It's very likely that what was slow there was not riot, but the server. The Matrix.org homeserver is notoriously overloaded.

lucideer7• 8 years ago

If you want to experience full speed Riot, you can choose a different server. This basically comes down to client UX: if server choice were more discoverable or if it at least didn't always default to the same one, then everyone wouldn't end up on a single overloaded server.

amandine2• 8 years ago

Just as well that we're working on it and released huge improvements yesterday! Think 70% reduction of memory use and dramatic reduction of launch time :) (https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-web-0-17-and-ios-0-7-6-... for the details)

We're still aiming for a full redesign of Riot.im to be out before end of the year, there should be things to look at at the end of the month, all crafted for the non-techy friends, so watch de the space!

And yes, the backend is not helping neither, although we've also done good progress on perf improvement there in the last months and still rolling new ones (e.g. Py3 being deployed as we speak and reducing server RAM by 3). Switching away from matrix.org can help, and agreed that a directory of public servers à la Mastodon could be interesting (although we would need to find a non-scary way to do so, lots of non-tech people would run away from it: they just want one click onboarding without having to understand what's happening behind the scenes). We've also soft launched a paid hosted offering, for 50-100 people teams who could do with their own DNS and faster servers at http://modular.im

mxuribe2• 8 years ago

I won't argue any of your UI opinions other than to say that riot - which is only one of the many possible clients [1] over the matrix protocol - is still in early days, and is getting better with each version. That being said, as far as having to remember everyone's matrix id, I'm sure users had similar complaints back when email addresses were still novel. I'm sure conceptual address books will be a thing in future matrix clients - both riot as well as others. Failing that, you can always submit a feature request! [2]

[1] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix [2] https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web

mahemm• 8 years ago

Why not use Signal? Better privacy guarantees and the same underlying protocol.

proaralyst2• 8 years ago

Had the same UI problems.

Also Signal isn't federated and doesn't use the Matrix protocol.

pricechild2• 8 years ago

IRC is listed as "E2E Private" true?

geoah2• 8 years ago

I assume it depends on the client?

pricechild2• 8 years ago

If you can communicate random text, you can layer E2E encryption over almost any communication medium. OTR is a great example of this. But it isn't a feature of the protocol.

Many irc servers listen on an ssl port, but this then only encrypts data between client and server. The data is decrypted on the server and sent to other clients. (Maybe encrypted)

Some ircd's support "encrypted only channels" where if you're not connected via ssl, you can't /join

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

You can use Pidgin as an IRC client and I'm sure with the OTR plugin you could have some E2E convo with someone else.

geoah2• 8 years ago

This is great thank you!!

Would love if the decentralised/federated were two distinct columns. :D

Peskier• 8 years ago

Maybe we could add a section regarding Api's, developer features or available authentication methods?

fyfy182• 8 years ago

Are there any good XMPP clients that provide a "modern" messenger experience? For example seamlessly switching between online/offline mode, built in audio and video calls, sharing photos/videos.

Zash• 8 years ago

These ones perhaps? https://conversations.im/ https://conversejs.org/ https://dino.im/

vader17• 8 years ago

Yes, Conversations (Android) and ConverseJS (web) are on par with - or better than - the commercial apps like Whatsapp. On ios, Chatsecure is pretty close.

pmlnr4• 8 years ago

Cross platform, closed source, including Jingle (audio/video): http://astrachat.com/

Android (no audio/video): https://conversations.im/

Web: https://conversejs.org/

Web with extras: https://movim.eu/

Desktop (Mac): https://adium.im/

Desktop (Win): https://gajim.org/ (not sure about this)

Desktop (Linux): http://pidgin.im/ (needs extras: https://petermolnar.net/instant-messenger-hell/#extra-plugin... )

vader17• 8 years ago

Pidgin is barely maintained for the last couple of years and doesn't support most modern XMPP extensions. I'd definitely recommend Gajim on both Windows and Linux, which supports everything you need out of the box.

paulryanrogers• 8 years ago

Is Adium still maintained? Their version history link is broken.

maufl• 8 years ago

Conversations for Android and Monal https://monal.im/ for iOS.

singhrac• 8 years ago

Does anyone know what supports E2E encrypted video? (Great doc btw)

CodeArtisan• 8 years ago

Wire https://wire.com/

datamoshr• 8 years ago

Wire comes with a short-fall by virtue of the fact they store a lot of metadata about you.[1]

Obviously your threat model informs this.

[1] https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/862394778331361281

crtasm• 8 years ago

I believe video calls on Signal are?

lozf2• 8 years ago

Yes, but like most of these, that's really to do with the fact that E2E is part of the WebRTC spec, so anything built on it is safe for audio & video... the main advantage of Signal here is not leaking all your metadata.

enitihas3• 8 years ago

WhatsApp does, atleast their doc says so. https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/28030015/ ( So as we’ve introduced more features – like video calling and Status – we’ve extended end-to-end encryption to these features as well.)

pmlnr4• 8 years ago

Nextcloud Talk does that, 2nd on the list.

nolok• 8 years ago

There are two "Line" listed, is it a mistake or are there really two of the same name ?

Because LINE claims to support E2E by default ("Letter Sealing"), but only one of those two listing says "claimed" (the other say false).

lucaspottersky• 8 years ago

look at that, XMPP is the future! /sarcasm

otabdeveloper1• 8 years ago

Where's the "don't allocate 8 gigabytes and crash the system" feature?

(Yeah Slack, I'm looking at you.)

toxik• 8 years ago

Indeed, and for "compatibility" it doesn't really say anything about the quality of the software for that system. Signal, for example, doesn't have a native iOS app and it shows.

chrisballinger• 8 years ago

Yes it does? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS

Daneel_• 8 years ago

It definitely does - I use it daily. Searching for ‘Signal’ on the App Store brings it back as the first result.

Infernal• 8 years ago

Maybe you meant that it doesn’t have a native macOS app? It is indeed an Electron app on macOS.

rvanmil• 8 years ago

Funny how that works isn't it. Let's start out with Electron so we can get our new app on all platforms quickly, we'll build a proper native UX when we can afford to >> company grows and grows >> yeah, so screw UX, where are our customers going to go instead? Hipchat? lol, let's buy them instead.

swiftcoder• 8 years ago

What is the data source for all of these? I'm particularly curious about a number of the "claimed" entries.

ub• 8 years ago

+1 It seems like someone just created a spreadsheet with no description of what methodology was used to test the assertions.

lrvick22• 8 years ago

If you click the cells you will see the rationale for columns or what "claimed" means etc.

kilare• 8 years ago

No mention of Semaphor by SpiderOak?

lrvick22• 8 years ago

looking into it and adding it.

momentito• 8 years ago

Have your tried Grape (chatgrape.com)? On-Premises and Eurocloud, used by banks, telco providers, city departments, energy providers etc. in Europe

John_KZ• 8 years ago

There still isn't a popular messaging and voice call platform that supports private end-to-end encryption by default. How terrible is this? I mean it would be so trivial to establish a secure and private communications standard. Europe and North America has a population of almost a billion people combined. If 500 millions of those live in first-world conditions and only 1% cares about privacy, with $1/year worth of giving a fuck we could have a budget of $5M/year, or close to 50 top notch developers to pull this off. Obviously a lot more could be spend, but even with this minuscule spending we could still have a viable, standardized alternative to Facebook and Google.

We literally had better privacy when we had analog phone lines that anyone could tap into. That's just terrible.

enitihas3• 8 years ago

Doesn't WhatsApp do that? (https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/28030015/)

codemusings• 8 years ago

If I recall correctly Facebook has plans to end E2E encryption in order to serve personalized ads.

stephen_g• 8 years ago

Signal does voice calls and is all end to end by default. I guess 'popular' is the operative word here, but at least in tech circles it is...

lucideer7• 8 years ago

WhatsApp does but the author of this sheet has chosen to list it as "claimed", despite other also-unverified clients like Telegram getting a "true" for their (non-default) e2e support.

FWIW I believe Riot/Matrix are planning e2e by default as soon as their implementation stabilises. Theirs is more complex/powerful than WhatsApp's though since they have multidevice support (which WhatsApp lacks). They've avoided making it default sofar due to bad UX and the possibility of losing access to conversations across devices, but it's improving rapidly.

amandine2• 8 years ago

Yup planning to get it on in the coming months. As a data point e2e by default is on for the French government deployment and we haven't seen huge drama, so we're mostly waiting to get the UX out. We'll be sharing our work for insights this week.

__david__• 8 years ago

Someone will correct me if I'm won't but I believe Apple Messages are end to end encrypted by default. I'm not sure if FaceTime audio/video is encrypted.

nothrabannosir2• 8 years ago

It is.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/123693/how-secu...

nothrabannosir2• 8 years ago

What do you mean by “private” so as not to have WhatsApp and iMessage fit this description ? Because as far as I understand, they do. Especially the telephone lines bit; iMessage and WhatsApp offer more privacy than telephone lines did, already at the operator level, but definitely at the tapping level.

Anonymous account creation? Open source? Audited?

upofadown• 8 years ago

Just pick an XMPP client that does:

* https://omemo.top/

There is no way that an open IM platform will be able to guarantee E2E by default on all clients simply because someone/somewhere will produce a client that doesn't or doesn't do it properly. It is probably better to start with the E2E encryption system (in my example OMEMO) and then see where you can get it.

mirap• 8 years ago

Why is Signal scoring so bad?

lucideer7• 8 years ago

The scoring seems arbitrary/subjective.

fiter• 8 years ago

I stopped using Signal due to being bitten by the the issue where a friend uninstalled Signal without going through a special process and then I couldn't send messages to them without changing my message type from encrypted to unencrypted every time. See report/references here[0].

[0] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8181

seba_dos17• 8 years ago

It's just a yet another closed silo. Its score seems about right relative to other listed networks.

turdnagel• 8 years ago

Surprised public API availability is not listed.

mappu• 8 years ago

This is a pretty important category for me. Users are actually pretty happy to migrate to new chat systems (with clear benefits) if you can pull off a gradual migration with seamless chat linking.

I did a gradual migration of our group chat from $LEGACY_CHAT_SYSTEM to Telegram because at the time, all the options with better crypto stories fell down; WhatsApp is very anti-bot, Wire's API was unusable on free accounts, Signal's group chats work differently / would've needed O(n) phone numbers, Rocketchat's IRC integration was incompatible, Matrix couldn't be simplified to hide the federation for standalone, etc etc.

CiPHPerCoder4• 8 years ago

Signal --- Introduced: 2017

What https://signal.org/blog/the-new-textsecure/

lucideer7• 8 years ago

As there's pretty obvious bias showing in the values, some methodology would be good to accompany this sheet.

e.g.

- Telegram: E2E Private: TRUE

- WhatsApp: E2E Private: CLAIMED

These are either both "true", or both "claimed". Pick one.

In particular, what's the definition of the "Open Spec" column? Signal's GPL spec gets a FALSE here so I'm presuming the definition is something along the lines of "Spec produced by one ofa group of arbitrarily approved bodies of which Open Whisper is not a member"

cbg0• 8 years ago

The comments specify what "claimed" means:

Not possible to verify as application is closed source. Maintainer could compromise security at any time without detection.

I think it's useful to have this differentiation, even though technically you could say E2E is TRUE for both of these.

lucideer7• 8 years ago

Ah, thanks, I didn't see those comments. That makes some sense for the E2E actually. That's a very reasonable distinction.

Technically one could still argue the same for Telegram unless you're self-building given their source-release delays but that might be nitpick too far.

drdaeman• 8 years ago

Telegram’s state of source code availability (and whenever prebuilt binaries match that) is a total mess. I think only F-Droid build would qualify, but not the mainstream sources.

zimbatm• 8 years ago

Even with an open source edition it's hard to link strongly the source code to the resulting APK. How do you know that the generated APK hasn't been built with extra "features"?

For each release, independent people would have to compile the same source code and inspect if there is any differences with the published APK.

One way to make this easier would be to fix the build system so each build with the same source would provide a bit-exact APK file (without timestamps). Then the independent parties just have to check if all of the bits are the same (with a hashing function).

Ideally Google would also publish the hash output of each APK so that it can be checked against another distribution channel on installation.

p4bl0• 8 years ago

Nice. It's missing RetroShare (which is not only a messenger system but can be used as one) :).

arendtio4• 8 years ago

Well, that is a protocol comparison. A client comparison would be much closer to the real world user experience. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge fan (and daily user) of XMPP, but the best protocol will not be of any use if the clients are too complicated or buggy to use.

So yes, XMPP supports audio and video calls but finding two different clients which work on the first try together can be a challenge. Sometimes I wish there would be some compatibility XEP which defines a common set of supported XEPs including a test suite to run it against.

giancarlostoro3• 8 years ago

Sounds like you may want to consider writing the spec for such a XEP?

ge0rg• 8 years ago

We have the XMPP Compliance Suites 2018[0] providing an overview of protocol-level specifications that a modern client or server should implement, and there was recently a nice article[1] for some example use cases.

What is still missing is everything above the wire protocol level. The XSF, being the XMPP Standards Foundation, is guarding the protocols, and things like UX and client interoperability are considered as off-scope. However, there are people interested in these topics as well looking for fresh collaborators.

[0] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0387.html

[1] https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/21-xmpp-use-cases-and-...

arendtio4• 8 years ago

That looks pretty cool. Maybe I should ask SamWhited why they didn't include OMEMO, Audio and Video Calls as features as he is writing in this thread too :D

pmlnr4• 8 years ago

real world user experience

I'm getting so tired of this. Real world user experience is that the constantly changing interfaces are driving everyone mad.

Stick to a thing and let people learn it.

lvh30• 8 years ago

This is neat but it has plenty of flaws.

I wish the definitions were spelled out. It says Signal isn't "anonymous", which I assume means "uses a phone number to find peers". And it has the usual feature matrix problem: sure XMPP "does E2E". But what does that mean? It supports S/MIME. Do you want S/MIME? (You don't.) It supports OTR, TS and SCIMP too: but you need to be an expert in messaging schemes to understand how those are different. None of them implement double ratchets. None of them implement even close to the privacy features Signal has implemented. But on this diagram it is clearly better because there is more green and less red.

Another example: "open server" and "on-premise" says nothing about whether or not you really want to run one of those instances. It just says that hypothetically one could.

In terms of errors: the linked "E2E audit" for Telegram did not audit E2E at all, and in fact only cites sources saying that it's probably fucked. Wire has a real audit that isn't listed. WhatsApp uses Signal, just with fewer of the.

Use WhatsApp to talk to normal people. Use Signal for nerds, and... probably Matrix for group collab? Or maybe stop caring about secure messages for group collab so much :-)

arendtio4• 8 years ago

Your points are valid but you didn't mention that OMEMO [1] implements Double Ratchet for XMPP. You can find a list of clients which support OMEMO on https://omemo.top

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO

lvh30• 8 years ago

That's a fair point, but the fact that there's yet another protocol, not mentioned on the XMPP E2E wiki, kinda plays into the point itself: XMPP has E2E maybe with a bunch of random protocols and the stars (and the people you talk with) need to align _just right_ for all of it to work. I think it would be fair to say that everyone uses WhatsApp and I know what they get, and at this point only XMPP people use XMPP (explicitly) and maybe they get some kind of E2E but who knows which one and what properties that has.

Boulth4• 8 years ago

It supports S/MIME. Do you want S/MIME? (You don't.)

Could you provide your source? I've never seen S/MIME used in XMPP. Client certificates for authentication sure but not for E2E security.

It supports OTR, TS and SCIMP too: but you need to be an expert in messaging schemes to understand how those are different.

OTR is being rolled back from clients in favor of OMEMO for good reasons: https://conversations.im/omemo/

lvh30• 8 years ago

S/MIME for XMPP E2E: https://xmpp.org/rfcs/rfc3923.html

I am aware that OTR is being rolled back. My point is that extensibility is at odds with practical security and privacy for the vast majority of users. The people who need it the most do not understand the difference between OMEMO and OTR, but I can tell them to go install WhatsApp or Signal, give them a rough idea of why you want one or the other, and everything will be copacetic.

gaff333• 8 years ago

Use WhatsApp to talk to normal people. Use Signal for nerds.

This has been my go-to advice for a while now too! The key driving point is that amazing crypto is 100% useless if the person you're talking to doesn't use it, or uses it incorrectly.

The only sticking point with the above advice is the nerds who think they understand crypto but don't and insist on you using some crazy app :/

lrvick22• 8 years ago

Consider that security you can't possibly verify is just marketing.

Maybe try listening to those nerds and try out some open alternatives with security that is possible to verify.

You might be surprised to find both tools are pretty low on the list in respect to security and privacy compared to tools with smaller marketing budgets.

lvh30• 8 years ago

Typo correction, but I can no longer edit: WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol, just with fewer of the privacy tweaks in the implementation. The criteria don't seem to consider those. They're important, but the two should be equivalent.

lrvick22• 8 years ago

Whatsapp is closed source so we can't really verify any claims about it. It thus gets "claimed"

lrvick22• 8 years ago

Please make comments on individual cells for improvements to be seen/added more easily. This is obviously big research undertaking that got thrown together last weekend :)

Another example: "open server" and "on-premise" says nothing about whether or not you really want to run one of those instances. It just says that hypothetically one could.

I know a number of people that run matrix.org servers for personal use and companies. The entire French government runs on riot.im/matrix.org.

When security and really privacy matters, you don't want a third party being able to push updates to your clients/servers at any time without warning.

None of them implement even close to the privacy features Signal has implemented. But on this diagram it is clearly better because there is more green and less red.

What features specifically? Happy to add more columns if signal really has anything unique to offer here.

The things Signal gets red marks on are pretty fair though imo, and things others do better.

Use WhatsApp to talk to normal people.

I think you will find many options above WhatsApp on the list in terms of security and privacy that have clients that are every bit as simple to use.

Other than their (very) effective marketing advantage, -why- would you encourage people towards these respective walled gardens instead of more open alternatives listed?

lvh30• 8 years ago

In order to comment on individual cells, we appear to first have to have an argument about how audits work. You say WhatsApp can only "claim" certain features as a consequence of it being closed source, but that's because of a misunderstanding about how audits work.

In a backchannel, as a consequence of this HN article, someone (names withheld to protect the guilty, they can identify themselves if they'd like) started looking at Dust and figured out the key store password is a hardcoded, short, ASCII string and the messages are encrypted with unauthenticated AES-CBC. They did not need the source code to do that.

JP Aumasson phrased it more eloquently than I could: https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2018/10/02/open-source...

lvh30• 8 years ago

The care Signal puts in that actually makes it a better, more secure messenger is primarily about metadata management. Consider how long it took for them to implement profiles, how much time they took to explain how their contact discovery works, et cetera. These are not trivial matters: they got subpoenaed and had nothing to respond with, because they're tried extraordinarily hard not to.

lrvick22• 8 years ago

Wire has a real audit that isn't listed

Fixed

kbenson• 8 years ago

That's always a problem with comparison charts when used to survey they field. The flip side is if they compare a bunch of features you don't care about at all, there's a bunch of red on some which makes no difference to you in real life, but now you either need to know what each esoteric feature means so you can ignore it, or just accept that the one with more red is probably worse and avoid it, even if overall it's a better fit for your needs. The extreme ends of this are simple charts where someone just tells you "good" or "bad" on one end, or pointlessly complex ones where someone adds bullshit fields like "experienced developers" or something like it.

I'm not sure what the solution is, besides much more interactive and thorough presentation of features in a way that allows classification of how advanced they are or likely you are to need them, but that's a lot of work. Until then, a comparison like this will always suffer from rarely matching exactly what the reader is looking for. They do work well as quick references though.

lvh30• 8 years ago

I'm concerned that they don't work well at all: a number of highly important properties are missing and a number of the criteria have been challenged; see rest of thread.

codedokode4• 8 years ago

Requiring a phone number means you have to disclose your identity (in many countries, for example in Russia) and your physical location (everywhere). This is the opposite to privacy and anonimity.

Imagine, one of your contacts is captured; attackers get his contact list that includes you; then they get your phone number from Signal; then they get your location and put you to all kinds of black lists, extremists lists, no fly lists, watch lists and so on.

Signal is nothing better than Telegram. They should be on the same position.

lvh30• 8 years ago

That equivalence does not follow. The counterpoint is simple: can people figure out how to get burner numbers? Yes, they can: there are a myriad of services for doing so. And, importantly: journalists already know how.

dfox• 8 years ago

When you compare Signal with Telegram on this axis you actually end up with Telegram being "safer". Because while Telegram needs phone number for initial registration you can just throw the SIM away after that (how to get anonnymous SIM capable of receiving SMS is left as an excercise for the reader, but I believe that getting reasonably anonymous burner SIM for this single use is possible and even easy anywhere in the world, with the extreme approach being "borrowing" it from some random IoT device) as the authorization of new devices occurs in-band.

the_clarence• 8 years ago

Yeah security for groups is messed up anyway.

lawnchair_larry2• 8 years ago

Signal using phone numbers is almost as anti-anonymous as you can possibly get. A phone number leaks nearly everything about you to anyone who has access to the right data sources. Most people would be more anonymous providing a SSN than a phone number in practice.

tptacek11• 8 years ago

You just said the same thing LVH did, just with more emphasis.

It's tough to reason about on a message board. Signal does some important privacy things better than anyone else does; for instance, Signal cares more about metadata that I think any mainstream messenger does.

On the other hand, Signal made a conscious, deliberate choice to ensure that it works for ordinary users. It is not a goal of Signal's to mollify the tiny fraction of people in the world who have strong opinions about Tor; it is much more important to them that, say, any immigration lawyer in the country could readily pick it up and start using it.

The phone number ID thing creates an instantly bootstrapped social network. It solves a problem Signal actually cares about, while making a problem nerds care about a little more annoying. That is a reasonable reason not to use Signal (if you're one of those nerds), but, like DeVault's inane F-Droid conspiracy theory, not a reasonable reason to warn people off of Signal.

Signal, WhatsApp, Wire: any one of those is going to be radically better than the alternatives nonspecialists are likely to use (Fb Messenger, email). But my confidence drops rapidly when you go to anything else on this list.

mxuribe2• 8 years ago

So, riot/matrix, nextcloud/talk, briar, and xmpp should merge together into a super-mega-awesome-protocol and transform into mega-message! ;-)

pmontra• 8 years ago

A missing column among the Features is if a system allows automation (chatbots or other). Notable examples: Telegram and FB Messenger do, WhatsApp doesn't (there are workarounds but they're mostly against the Terms of Service.)

lrvick22• 8 years ago

Great suggestion. Will add this.

bootlooped• 8 years ago

Kakao Talk has claimed to have E2E Encrypted chat at least since 2014; it is not on by default.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2856452/kakao-talk-adds-secr...

https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/07/chat-app-kakao-talk-begins...

daurnimator• 8 years ago

Amended.

bkfh• 8 years ago

I came across Tungsten Messenger the other day and it's supporting even multiple personas (public, private) and runs traffic via Tor. Pretty neat UI and the team is throwing out new features regularly: http://tungstenapp.com/

(Edit: typo)

akareilly• 8 years ago

Here's another scorecard: https://www.securemessagingapps.com/

The EFF doesn't do recommendations for all users - whether a messenger works for someone depends on their threat model. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/why-we-cant-give-you-r...

LinuxBender2• 8 years ago

There is no mention of Mumble (client) or Murmur (server). [1] From a privacy perspective, I find it superior to everything else. End-to-end voice encryption with PFS. As much or little server logging as you wish. Super easy to set up and scales to large numbers of people. I have a few of them running on VM's with 1GB ram. Only downside for me: It is not as happy-clicky (frictionless) as discord, yet.

Authentication can be tied into 3rd party apps (LDAP, phpBB, etc) but I have not tested this yet. [2]

If you try it, use their latest snapshot for server and client. Incredible sound quality. Nice UI/UX experience. Decent support for game overlays. Very low CPU usage.

[1] https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page

[2] https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/3rd_Party_Applications#Authent...

lrvick22• 8 years ago

Added!

rdtsc2• 8 years ago

It's funny and sad that XMPP hits almost all of the points, has been around since 1999 and yet every year someone reinvents the wheel and makes another messenger system. There are what, about 60+ by now.

Granted XMPP is not a messenger it's a protocol and a bunch of standards but still it's hard not to laugh.

gaff333• 8 years ago

XMPP has a terrible user experience, which is why it's never caught on.

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

XMPP is a protocol; it doesn't have a user experience. Sure, it may have been difficult to adapt for mobile, but that doesn't mean it inherently has a poor experience.

brianacton• 8 years ago

When Jan and I evaluated XMPP in 2009, we found that it was not very mobile friendly. To provide a couple of examples -- (1) The login path required an inordinate number of round trips (I think it was 4+). This slowed down login quite considerably. (2) XMPP is byte verbose and expensive on mobile networks.

We came to the conclusion that XMPP was built for desktop computers connected to strong internet via LAN connections not for mobile networks. We went on to invent our own protocol which was byte efficient and minimized roundtrips.

Now take all of this with a grain of salt. It is now 2018 and things have changed considerably.

seba_dos17• 8 years ago

that XMPP was built for desktop computers connected to strong internet via LAN connections not for mobile networks

Oh it definitely was. However, extending it to work well on mobile devices without throwing the whole protocol away turned out to be feasible.

AceJohnny2• 8 years ago

Yeah, I remember 10 years ago (or more), they were looking into ways to make it more mobile friendly, including Roster Versioning (so you wouldn't need the whole series of transactions to get your roster on initial connection), session keepalive (the basic protocol expects one long TCP session, which is of course impractical on mobile), and stream compression.

Sadly, those weren't really enough at the time, and the new protocol Babel happened.

rdtsc2• 8 years ago

We went on to invent our own protocol which was byte efficient and minimized roundtrips.

Completely understandable. And well, looking back it was the right decision. You definitely have solid proof.

Yeah as much as XMPP looks good on paper I don't think it will ever take over the messaging world. Even if the devices and the network capacity could handle the larger messages I feel developers don't really want to deal with XML standards. There were a lot of cool things in the 90's but XML wasn't one of them.

amckinlay• 8 years ago

Is there any messenger that does end-to-end encryption with reliable, in-order delivery with decentralized group chat and conversation history syncing? Been looking for years but so far the double-ratchet is inadequate.

LinuxBender2• 8 years ago

Mumble / Murmur are close to this, but without chat history syncing. End-To-End PFS encryption though. Very decentralized, but you can tie it into ldap and other authentication systems. I linked in another part of this thread.

c8g• 8 years ago

nextcloud talk looks good. btw, telegram web has mobile support.

eeetzatrap• 8 years ago

Just installed the Nextcloud Talk App. I'm toes deep, but it looks pretty neat so far.

clofresh• 8 years ago

Needs to be updated to show which of my friends use which system

crunchiebones2• 8 years ago

I can't see Jitsi there

crunchiebones2• 8 years ago

also, what about 'blockchain messaging' apps like Dust, Echo etc. ?

lvh30• 8 years ago

Dust is woefully underspecified and uses an ancient design with no forward secrecy and no (specified) message or sender authentication of any kind.

Blockchain, as usual, purports to solve a problem nobody had. Dust doesn't try to address the simplest, best-understood problems we have for reputation systems on chained blocks.

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

iMessage is technically phoneless; you can sign up with your Apple ID on macOS.

jstanley2• 8 years ago

What does "E2E Audit" mean? Or, why does Ricochet have a "false"? The Ricochet codebase has been audited, if that's what it's supposed to mean.

jhammons• 8 years ago

I think it means two parties can verify their public encryption keys with one another.

jstanley2• 8 years ago

E.g. by comparing them in person? Ricochet can do that. The "Ricochet ID" is just a hash of the public key, so if you meet up in person and verify that you have added the correct ID for your counterparty, that sounds like you've verified the public keys, no?

lvh30• 8 years ago

Since the author added a link to the Wire audit after I pointed out it existed, I think it means "third party has audited it and verified claims". On the other hand, they also still claim Telegram has been audited in this sense, which I have also pointed out and they have not resolved.

tooker• 8 years ago

https://forsta.io is missing.

SamWhited4• 8 years ago

XMPP is a protocol meant for building chat services; some of these others are chat services themselves so eg. it doesn't make sense to say that XMPP is not e2e by default (of course it's not, it's a protocol which may or may not be used to build an e2e encrypted chat service). Maybe that should be changed to "Jabber" which is what a lot of people call the public, federated network of servers built on XMPP these days? (The term has all sorts of other historical baggage and some people use XMPP/Jabber as synonyms, but mostly I think people use Jabber to refer to the public network these days and XMPP to the protocol, rather like email and SMTP).

gyvastis• 8 years ago

Would be nice to show some numbers as well, how much are these platforms used.

unsignedint• 8 years ago

LINE E2E are "Partial Claimed" their E2E encryption only encrypts text and GPS location and other are not encrypted.[0]

[0] https://engineering.linecorp.com/en/blog/detail/65

mo3gut• 8 years ago

It's amusing that this is hosted by a spyware vendor.

ac4tw• 8 years ago

Interesting comparison Irvick. Enjoying the resuling conversation too. More detail on meanings and methodology would be helpful as some other HN folks suggest.

Stealthy.im isn't mentioned (I develop that presently).

Stealthy makes use of decentralized identity in the blockchain and a decentralized storage system called GAIA. Regular chat is E2E encrypted using ECIES. Currently released for Android and iOS.

oropolo• 8 years ago

With categories emphasizing security, open standards, and audited code, I'm surprised SpiderOak's Semaphor isn't on this list: https://spideroak.com/semaphor/

paxy• 8 years ago

What's the difference behind TLS "true" or "claimed"? It's pretty straightforward to verify all outgoing requests the client is making without looking at source code.

egypturnash• 8 years ago

So many competing, incompatible protocols. So, so many.

Also this is lacking a column for "stickers". Seriously they are one of the things that has my and my crowd using Telegram, especially since it's really easy to make your own custom sets instead of relying on whatever they pay someone to draw for you.

codedokode4• 8 years ago

I think Tox should be higher than Jabber. With Tox, there are no servers and contact list is stored on your device. With Jabber, it is stored on the server (and will be happily provided to NSA when needed). So unless you deploy your own Jabber server, it provides less privacy.

Regarding Wire, is not contact list stored on Wire's server? Then it is even less private than Jabber.

tanderson92• 8 years ago

The spreadsheet seems to be missing e-mail.

jplayer012• 8 years ago

A flawed document like this does far more harm than it does good. I'd implore the author to take it down before they mislead people into drawing the wrong conclusions.

touristtam• 8 years ago

No hipchat from atlassian ?

Messenger systems compared by security, privacy, compatibility, and features

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