[EN] Briar is a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate.

 

How it works

briarproject.org

2 min

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Briar is a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server - messages are synchronized directly between the users’ devices. If the internet’s down, Briar can sync via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, keeping the information flowing in a crisis. If the internet’s up, Briar can sync via the Tor network, protecting users and their relationships from surveillance.

The quick start guide and the manual describe how to use Briar and the features that are available.

Technical details are available on the wiki and explained in this video.

Briar uses direct, encrypted connections between users to prevent surveillance and censorship.

Typical messaging software relies on central servers and exposes messages and relationships to surveillance.

Briar can share data via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the Internet.

Briar provides private messaging, public forums and blogs that are protected against the following surveillance and censorship threats:

• Metadata surveillance. Briar uses the Tor network to prevent eavesdroppers from learning which users are talking to each other. Each user’s contact list is encrypted and stored on her own device.
• Content surveillance. All communication between devices is encrypted end-to-end, protecting the content from eavesdropping or tampering.
• Content filtering. Briar’s end-to-end encryption prevents keyword filtering, and because of its decentralized design there are no servers to block.
• Takedown orders. Every user who subscribes to a forum keeps a copy of its content, so there’s no single point where a post can be deleted.
• Denial of service attacks. Briar’s forums have no central server to attack, and every subscriber has access to the content even if they’re offline.
• Internet blackouts. Briar can operate over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to keep information flowing during blackouts.

Briar is designed to resist surveillance and censorship by an adversary with the following capabilities:

• All long-range communication channels (internet, phone network, etc) are comprehensively monitored by the adversary.
• The adversary can block, delay, replay and modify traffic on long-range communication channels.
• The adversary has a limited ability to monitor short-range communication channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc).
• The adversary has a limited ability to block, delay, replay and modify traffic on short-range communication channels.
• The adversary can deploy an unlimited number of devices running Briar.
• There are some users who can keep their devices secure - those who can’t are considered, for the purposes of the threat model, to be controlled by the adversary.
• The adversary has a limited ability to persuade users to trust the adversary’s agents - thus the number of social connections between the adversary’s agents and the rest of the network is limited.
• The adversary can’t break standard cryptographic primitives.

Our long-term plans go far beyond messaging: we’ll use Briar’s data synchronization capabilities to support secure, distributed applications including crisis mapping and collaborative document editing. Our goal is to enable people in any country to create safe spaces where they can debate any topic, plan events, and organise social movements.

About Us

briarproject.org

2 min

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Michael Rogers started the Briar project to support freedom of expression, freedom of association and the right to privacy. He has studied and built peer-to-peer systems for over a decade and contributed to Freenet and LimeWire.

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She has been working as a security consultant since 2003, specializing in security design and strategy, and makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex sociotechnical systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better.

Torsten Grote is a Free Software activist and programmer. He studied computer science as well as philosophy and is interested in various topics of technology-enabled social and political change. As a member of the Free Software Foundation Europe, he ran their Free Your Android campaign to show people how they can use their mobile device securely and in freedom.

Julian Dehm is an advocate of freedom of speech and movement. He studies computer science at Freie Universität Berlin with a focus on security and privacy. He’s contributing to Briar in his spare time and is working on a funded project to improve Briar’s battery usage and message delivery even when contacts are not online at the same time.

Benedikt Wieder has contributed to a variety of open source projects ranging from artistic tools to security applications. During his bachelor studies in Computer Science he researched and worked with variations of the Kademlia distributed hash table (DHT) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for use in secure communication.

Nico Alt started the development of Briar GTK to bring Briar to non-Android platforms. Having been an F-Droid developer for a long time, he sincerely wishes free alternatives to Android to succeed and is mainly interested in free software to empower people.

Past Contributors

Ernir Erlingsson has been building mobile applications on multiple platforms for over a decade. He is a full stack developer, and an avid supporter of open-source software, with a keen interest in theoretical computer science and algorithms.

Jack Grigg is a core developer of the I2P anonymity network and lead developer of I2P Android. He has a keen interest in privacy and anonymity research, and enjoys helping other developers create privacy-respecting software. He is also a budding UX enthusiast and holds a PhD in Applied Physics from Lincoln University, New Zealand.

Bernard Tyers is an independent interaction designer and user researcher. He is interested in privacy and applying user-centred design to usable security. He is a long-time supporter of the Open Rights Group, Tor and free software projects.

Governance

The project is governed by a voluntary board. All contributors must adhere to the code of conduct.

Funding

Briar has received funding from the Small Media Foundation, the Open Internet Tools Project, Access Now, the Open Technology Fund, the Prototype Fund, Internews, the NLnet Foundation, the Next Generation Internet programme, the ISC Project and eQualit.ie.

Contact

To contact the team, please email contact@briarproject.org [PGP key] .

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