#Qtox connection problems install#
#Qtox connection problems code#

I have tried countless apps, Signal, Wire, SafeSwiss, and tons more. I am desperately looking for the most secure alternative to Skype I can possibly find. I just don’t think it’s the be-all-end-all of privacy-preserving messaging, and my only true complaint is that I think it’s made people stop striving for more because it’s so good.Hi, never posted on here but someone advised me to so here I am. I think it’s not up for argument that it’s made it much further than any encrypted-messenger has before, and its encryption protocol is great. I tell most anyone who asks me what messenger to use to simply use Signal. I also don’t think Signal is in any way a p2p system, so again, not sure what you mean by this.Īs an aside: I don’t hate Signal, or try to dissuade anyone from using it. I think Tox has made a lot of progress in making their p2p system secure. Maybe you mean something else.Īlso “ the security of a peer-to-peer one” - I don’t think p2p systems are inherently secure. What do you mean “reliablilty of a centralised system”? When Signal has gone down multiple times in the past year, I’ve continued using Tox… I find this design more reliable. As such, it combines the reliability of a centralised system with the security of a peer-to-peer one. It has a centralised component but it is designed such that this component is out of the TCB for confidentiality or integrity, only for availability. There is also onion routing which in combination with the aforementioned temp keys allows for nodes to make and respond to friend requests without nodes knowing where they are (or what IP they are connected with). With Tox you have short-term keys which are used in the DHT which are not connected to your longterm keypair, so knowing these keys does not reveal anything except “some node” is participating in the DHT.

#Qtox connection problems code#

I’ve heard various claims -some contradictory- about what information the server can and cannot observe, and I am not in the position to audit the source code myself. I can’t speak to Signal’s metadata protection. In Tox, if I remember the protocol correctly, this is visible to anyone who can get your public key. In what way? The only metadata that is not protected in Signal is the last time you connected to the network.

#Qtox connection problems install#

Tox came second but since I started using Signal I’ve been incredibly happy with it (in particular, how easy it is for folks who have used WhatsApp to install it and use it instead) and an alternative would need a compelling reason to make me switch. Mobile clients that won’t drain the battery or otherwise annoy people I want to talk to who use their phone in preference to a desktop for messaging.

A setup process I was confident that my mother could do without in-person assistance.

Protocol subject to external adversarial security review.

Conversations can move between devices without the remote party needing to do anything.

Desktop and mobile clients with feature parity between them.

I looked at Tox, GNU Ring, XMPP (again), and Signal at the time, and Signal was the only one that met all of my requirements (in no particular order): I don’t think the protocol had had a rigorous security review by any cryptographers and the UI for setting up an account and connecting to contexts was a bit much for most non-technical folks. There were some smaller problems as well.

The peer-to-peer nature of the protocol made it very battery-intensive on mobile devices.

There were plans to add this to the protocol, but they were all in the design phase.

I couldn’t easily move a conversation between devices.

I tried Tox a few years ago and there were two big problems: