BitTorrent Chat

BitTorrent has been making some great spin-offs off of the BitTorrent protocol, spin-offs which are more socially-sanctioned than the protocol's most ubiquitous use.

BitTorrent Sync, for instance, is a decentralized file sharing alternative to services like Dropbox - instead of your files going to a central server owned by another organization, files are synced using the BitTorrent protocol across your various devices. It's quite fast and your files only ever exist on devices you control.

The one I'm most excited about is BitTorrent Chat. BitTorrent Chat is more experimental, but uses the protocol for decentralized, anonymous, and encrypted communication.

Once upon a time BitTorrent did require a central server of some kind - a tracker, which keeps track of other peers in the "swarm" so the client knows who to connect to. Pretty much all other chat protocols also require a central server to coordinate the messaging.

But since then an alternative has taken over: distributed hash tables (DHT), where peers are located via other peers (that is, in a decentralized manner). BT Chat uses DHT (updated to support encryption) to altogether remove the need for a central server.

Users are at most identified by their public encryption keys and the service uses forward secrecy; that is, for each communication, a short-term key is derived from the public keys of the chatters so that any future compromise of the original public keys does not compromise past chats.

Basically what this amounts to is:

• you communicate directly with whoever you're talking to, without going through any machine you don't control (aside from DHT to locate them in the first place).
• all your communications are encrypted so that no one can snoop your messages as they go.
• even if some attacker gets a hold of your public key, the use of forward secrecy means that they can't decrypt any of your past communications.

BitTorrent Chat is only in alpha at the moment, but it has potential to be a great new and secure system for online discussions. Really excited to see where it goes.

I'm onboard with BitTorrent's mission and hope to see more applications of their decentralized approach. With the uneasy and increasingly cynical (and resigned) atmosphere around surveillance, these kinds of technologies are really intriguing and valuable.

Although...while such applications provide us alternatives to untrustworthy intermediary servers, we'll still worry about who's on the other end.