Let me edit in one more relevant info:
I don’t use it, but my contacts may or may not use it.
For those who don’t know, Beeper is an app that aims to unite all your messaging apps into one. To do this, it makes use of Matrix, bridging all those services together. So far, so cool.
However, since different services often use different encryption protocols, messages between those services and Matrix have to be decrypted on Beepers’ servers, before being re-encrypted with the protocol of the recipient.
They are completely open and transparent about this (which I can very much respect), and state that chats on their servers are encrypted, so they can’t read them.
Still though, decrypting mid-transit kinda throws the whole end-to-end part out of the window.
Some might say that everyone needs to decide for themselves if that’s a problem. But the issue with that is that if you decide to use Beeper, you also decide that every person you chat with is okay with it. Not very cool in my book.
That’s where the question asking for independant audits comes in, because I certainly don’t have the expertise to look at their code. If everything is safe from attackers, then cool.
But me for example, I switched to Signal specifically for verifiable and proper End-to-End Encryption, so chatting with someone who uses Signal through Beeper kinda defeats the point.
Because, how does Beeper even get what they need to decrypt a message I send to a Beeper user?
I don’t consent to a third party decrypting my messages, simply because one of my contacts uses their service. That is fundamentally wrong in my opinion.
What are your thoughts on this?
I guess what I’m saying is that if the recipient chooses to use Beeper, the chain ends there though… Signal did its job and delivered an encrypted message, and you can’t control that the recipient gave decryption keys to Beeper.
Both Signal and Beeper aren’t doing anything inherently wrong, but if you don’t trust messages passing through beeper servers you need to have that conversation with the recipient.
It just seems very wrong that some random service can decrypt my messages. Like, what.
Beeper being able to do that without consent from both contacts is very wrong to me, at least.
Signal should be firmly against this, seeing how they already proclaimed being against interoperability, but what do I know.