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Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

news.ycombinator.com

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Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#1

Post by capableweb »

Since Keybase is being acquired by Zoom (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430), it would be lazy to not start looking at alternatives already

I myself mostly use the following features from Keybase: Chat, KBFS, Git repositories and encrypting messages sent out-of-band via PGP in Keybase (and the various cryptographic tools [signing, validation etc])

What alternatives have the features outlined above, but are ideally either FOSS or at least not run by a for-profit company? I mainly used Keybase to make using those features easier, so please don't suggest the cli of gnupgp (or similar) as alternatives.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#5

Post by client4 »

I'd suspect this is jumping the gun a lot bit. Keybase was running a free service for years and has matured a lot in the last year (post crypto debacle). There's nothing stopping them from 1. Letting Keybase go into maintenance mode. 2. Donating the server to a foundation. 3. Open sourcing there server.

In all these scenarios Zoom gets better security which is a win for the world :)

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#8

Post by atonse »

I am also curious here. I have used and advocated strongly for Keybase with a couple of local government clients to send sensitive files back and forth (not sensitive in the sense of national security, but more to preserve privacy and store encrypted at rest).

But I want to get ahead of the concern that Keybase is now owned by a Chinese company, which instantly compromises it.

PGP is dead on arrival, since it's an overcomplicated mess.

Keybase felt like WireGuard for its use case, just dead simple and also secure.

Update: I just want to clarify that I am happy for the Keybase team. This is clearly an Aquihire meant to bolster Zoom's security talent. And as a Zoom user, I'm generally happy about this development. But there will definitely be a concern about them being acquired by a Chinese company.

Update #2: I thought about FooBarWidget and others' comments, and I'm going to alter my wording. Zoom isn't a Chinese company, but their development team has been entirely based in China all this time and there have been concerns about that (which are entirely legitimate for certain groups like governments, in my opinion), especially given their communications aren't e2e encrypted.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#9

Post by simlevesque »

client4 wrote: post #5

I'd suspect this is jumping the gun a lot bit. Keybase was running a free service for years and has matured a lot in the last year (post crypto debacle). There's nothing stopping them from 1. Letting Keybase go into maintenance mode. 2. Donating the server to a foundation. 3. Open sourcing there server. In all these scenarios Zoom gets better security which is a win for the world :)

They will lost all the people working on it. The ship has sailed.

Re: Ask HN: Keybase Alternatives?

#10

Post by SkyMarshal »

I think the only complete alternative is to successfully persuade the Keybase team to release their server code under an open source license. Their client is already open source.

https://github.com/keybase

The only other alternative is a mishmash of multiple apps that each do part of what Keybase does.

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