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Wire open-sourced

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Re: Wire open-sourced

#11

Post by computator »

gfosco wrote: post #2

A link to a GitHub organization isn't great.. I'd say this is better: https://medium.com/@wireapp/you-can-now-build-your-own-wire-... but even that doesn't clearly explain what Wire is. Visit https://wire.com to find out it's an encrypted video and group chat app.

From a Hacker News reader's perspective, the following page seems to be the best explanation of what it does:

https://wire.com/privacy/

Also, the Wikipedia entry is a good overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_Swiss

Re: Wire open-sourced

#13

Post by eps »

stemuk wrote: post #7

I wonder how they encrypted their chat on the web client. Scince the Signal protocol is kind of the gold standard right now, probably their solution might in the end be the better one.

> Since the Signal protocol is kind of the gold standard right now

Oy vey. The perils of reading HN too much.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#14

Post by woah »

stemuk wrote: post #8
qznc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, Signal plus video chat?

Probably not, scince Signal doesn't really support secure web communication (without phone routing).

What do you mean? Are you objecting to the phone number used as username?

Re: Wire open-sourced

#15

Post by lorenzhs »

stemuk wrote: post #8
qznc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, Signal plus video chat?

Probably not, scince Signal doesn't really support secure web communication (without phone routing).

This phone routing story keeps getting repeated here but it's not true and never was. The devices share a key but are completely independent. You can easily try it, put your phone into airplane mode and Signal-Desktop works just the same.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#16

Post by pepesza »

pedalpete wrote: post #9

I don't get how they can make statements like this "Only Wire offers fully encrypted calls, video and group chats available on all your devices". Webrtc is encrypted by default.

Because encryption without authentication is prone to MITM attacks. WebTRC does not have auth layer.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#17

Post by ianopolous »

mahyarm wrote: post #5

Now all this needs is a few good third party audits, verifiable builds and it's the holy grail of encrypted communications!

I would say the Holy Grail would be fully decentralized without needing central servers, but this does look cool nonetheless.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#18

Post by jalami »

Side note, but it's kind of strange that images on their site require cookies enabled to view. I didn't dig into a reason, I just white-list the sites I want to use cookies and found it odd that there were big white spaces before doing so.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#19

Post by niftich »

stemuk wrote: post #7

I wonder how they encrypted their chat on the web client. Scince the Signal protocol is kind of the gold standard right now, probably their solution might in the end be the better one.

They use a Rust library [1] they wrote for the Axolotl protocol, which is the old name for the Signal protocol before it was renamed [2]. They refer to their implementation as 'Proteus'.

[1] https://github.com/wireapp/proteus

[2] https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-inside-and-out/

EDIT: Their webapp is written in Coffeescript, including their cryptography functions used in said webapp [3].

[3] https://github.com/wireapp/wire-webapp/search?q=proteus&type...

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