#Bitmessage email client software#
#Bitmessage email client code#
#Bitmessage email client download#

For some people this will be a nuisance since the addresses are not memorable, but the trade-off is to break the link with a person’s identity as required for improving anonymity. Computers have no problem at storing addresses so management does not need to be a an issue current email clients store contacts in an address book which means that there is rarely a need to remember anyone’s email address. This was one of the primary design goals as the creator noted that BitMessage should “bridge the gap between the ease of use of email and the security of PGP/GPG.” įor some people, there is an additional layer of comfort offered by this scheme which is that there are no companies or governments performing an administration role which some believe could compromise the independence of development and ultimately privacy. Hash-based addressing system While the addresses are cryptographically linked to public keys, the addresses are not obviously linkable to a person’s identity. All public keys are automatically retrieved via the network.

This means that there is a strong link between the addresses and the public keys which are used to exchanged the symmetric keys of message encryption. The addressing system in Bitmessage is hash-based and is calculated as a hash of a public key. Trustless In this context it means that there it is not necessary to use certificates, or certificate chains, as a means of checking the authenticity of a communicant. As discussed in section 3.2.3, it is difficult to achieve anonymity without having a decentralised network.

#Bitmessage email client download#

All users who download the BitMessage client become a node within the network and have an equal importance, which is to say that the network is fully decentralised. Strong anonymity model for passing messagesįully Decentralised means that there is no special node in the network that handles administration or routing.Hash-based addressing system (usernames).Fully decentralised peer-to-peer network.

#Bitmessage email client code#

The white paper was the starting point of researching this scheme, but the scheme’s wiki, GitHub page notes and source code were also consulted.

At the time of writing (in 2015) the most stable build is version 0.4.4 (released October 2014) and can be found on GitHub .

#Bitmessage email client software#

The project, loosely inspired by Bitcoin, was released in November 2012 by software developer Jonathan Warren and is open source under the MIT license. The main aim of the software was to increase a user’s privacy beyond what is offered by email and PGP, but also to be easier to use. This scheme provides a strong theoretical basis for providing anonymous communication as will be explored in this chapter. (Note: this text was first written in 2015 and has not been updated to reflect any possible changes in BitMessage) 4.1 – Introduction and overview Weaknesses will also be addressed before a conclusion is drawn. This chapter will review the following aspects of BitMessage: In this chapter BitMessage will be discussed in enough detail such that its methods for providing anonymous communication can be understood, both theoretically and in practise. It has been picked as potentially the strongest candidate for ensuring anonymity in communication, and in theory could achieve all five levels of anonymity (as outlined in section 2.1.4) and that it uses many of the ideas identified in section 3.2 to ensure anonymity of communicants and robustness of the network. One of the most promising schemes for facilitating anonymous communication is BitMessage.