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 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.
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.
A bunch of countries turn off the internet at the first sign of protests, hell sometimes they just turn it off to stop "a bunch of college kids from cheating during test week"
> It does if you consider that everyone can act as a relay.
Let's think this through. Imagine civil war breaks out in Australia, and communications infrastructure is destroyed or shut off. I'm in Sydney and want to transmit a message to a friend in Perth.
How exactly is "everyone acts as a relay" going to work? In particular, how is it going to scale when everyone in the country is trying to do the same things?
> This is also how apple airtags can be find anywhere there's an iphone users nearby.
This is incorrect. Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think. Those nearby Internet-connected devices send the airtag's location to a server.
Nothing about this would work without the Internet.
Yeah, I think current tech assumes a server relay. However imo, and if I were to imagine a solution, in this case I think a message would need a ttl, say 24 hours. In a local mesh/hive everyone would store a copy of the undelivered messages. When people move between hives they would sync these undelivered messages where ttl didn't expire. With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages. Undelivered means a destination user that didn't show in a hive. Wdyt?
> With perhaps a storage limit of say 1k undelivered messages.
If you want this to scale you'd need a scheme to deal with limited cache per device. Something like having each device assign a random priority to each message it has in transit. That way everyone culls a different set when things fill up.
> would need a ttl, say 24 hours
Probably better off scaling priority by age. That way you deliver if at all possible, until it eventually falls out of cache. Some people will be able to dedicate much more storage than others.
I do think this approach would be fairly tractable within "hives" where most of the members have few-hop connections to all of the others, most of the time. The trouble is that there would be so many unpredictable cases:
- Regular travelers between cities (e.g. flight attendants) might be the only reliable links between those hives. Travel patterns change, war breaks out, etc and the hive suddenly splits into two (or more).
- A lot of people probably move around too much, and too unpredictable, to participate in a hive that's stable on scales necessary to maintain a TTL of <24h and a reasonable amount of cache for storing others’ undelivered messages.
Maybe I'm being too pessimistic here… I do think it'd be fascinating and instructive to try to build and use a hive/mesh messaging system like this at scale.
Basically, if you visit the Galapagos and you're so inclined… you leave a letter for someone else, and you sift through the letters that have been left there, and try to find one or two that you could conceivably hand-deliver when you return home.
The latency is 100~1000x longer than "normal" snail mail. This is basically with one "hive" constructed around tourists and researchers in an unusual location. But it basically works.
> Airtags (and the Google version) communicate with nearby Internet-connected devices, via Bluetooth and NFC I think
Yes, exactly (BLE, UWB, NFC).
First, Airtags only have a coin-cell battery. It is not remotely viable for them to be doing any sort of serious "communicating" because the battery would die in seconds.
Second, making the Airtag effectively a dumb device means you gain the various security and privacy benefits, and means everything needed to make the magic happen can be transmitted in a single BLE/UWB/NFC packet (bringing us back to the battery life aspect already mentioned).
> I haven't studied the protocol but that seems like it has some...obvious routing issues.
Yes indeed. I don't understand how the peer-to-peer relaying can possibly scale without some directed routing algorithm.
If my phone running Briar is literally handing off every as-yet-undelivered message to every other phone running Briar, we're going to pretty quickly become overwhelmed.
