Hello everyone, I would like to introduce you to a communications protocol I have been working on called Bitmessage. I have also written an open source client released under the MIT/X11 license. It borrows ideas from Bitcoin and Hashcash and aims to form a secure and decentralized communications protocol which also doesn't rely on trust. Criticism of the X.509 certificate system is understandably common in this listserv (and also increasingly common in more public forums); Bitmessage instead uses Bitcoin-like addresses for authentication. It has a 'broadcast' and 'subscription' feature which other people have described as a decentralized Twitter and also aims to hide "non-content" data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs. It may also be possible to be strong against active attackers although I'm not yet making that claim.
A primary goal has been to make a clean and simple interface so that the key management, authentication, and encryption is simple even for people who do not understand public-key cryptography. I'm sure that there is quite a bit of demand for such a program and protocol although I am currently not actively promoting it because it has not been independently audited. I would be interested to hear your comments. The website https://bitmessage.org links to various resources like a short whitepaper describing how the protocol works and what its goals are ( https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf ) and the source code on Github ( https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage ). The main source code file is bitmessagemain.py. Bitmessage is written in Python and uses an OpenSSL wrapper called pyelliptic (written by a different individual) to implement ECIES and ECDSA. Again I look forward to hearing comments; it is always easier to change or add to a protocol earlier than it is later. All the best, Jonathan Warren
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