I really want to sign up for Beeper, but the fact I have to give them my phone number to sign up for a waitlist seemed like a red flag. How is their security profile?
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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They do have to run servers in order to keep the service alive. If you want to run this stuff yourself on your own server that’s possible using PyPush. The reason they have to run those servers for you is to keep the notification service alive.
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By that logic, there's nothing guaranteeing iMessage on iPhones is secure or private either because it's closed source. If you don't want to trust Beeper mini, you'll be free to run their iMessage bridge on your own Matrix stack when they open source it at some point, which they're promising to do (and you still won't know that Apple isn't scraping your messages on the iOS side). When I decide to trust a company, it's because I look at what they're transparently communicating to their end users. Every indication is that they are trying to get out of the middle of handling encrypted messages. Their first move to make this happen was allowing people to self host their own Beeper bridges (which you can still do with Beeper Cloud if you prefer and you will know that your messages are always encrypted within the Beeper infrastructure). They aren't going to release the source for their client ever because that's the only way they make any money.
Notice how in the article they say "we're not the middle man... Any more"? That's because, up until now, Beeper has been working on a system where they operate as a middle man for your data.
To be fair they never claimed otherwise and all of the code for the bridges are open-sourced and can be run on your own servers so that those servers you control (as opposed to Beeper-owned servers) act as a "middle man" and none of your messages need be trusted to a 3rd party.
To put it simply: only the actual bridge on Beeper Cloud has access to unencrypted messages and you do have the option to run the bridge yourself while continuing to use the Beeper app. You can use as many or as few self-hosted bridges as you'd like.
A few bridges are preconfigured for self-hosting with just a couple of clicks for free through fly.io here
This post is referring to beeper mini. It's confusing naming, but that's not the same as beeper(cloud service). Beeper mini is available to everyone on the play store and is not a cloud service. You just get it, login to Google (to pay the subscription cost) and it works. No invite needed
That's to prevent multiple entries by one person. Their security is very good, with audits and their products being largely open source (for this, PyPush. For Beeper Cloud, their Synapse fork and their bridges.). Only the parts that don't matter to security (the clients, mostly) are closed source.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
What may hold it at bay is the Digital Markets App (DMA), a law in Europe that says big tech companies will have to have an interoperable interface for their chat networks.
In addition, Beeper uses certificate pinning, which makes network traffic analysis more difficult to perform in order to verify its claims.
To work around this limitation, the team built BPNs to connect to Apple’s servers on the user’s behalf when the app isn’t running.
When the Android phone’s battery died, however, the texts reverted to green bubbles and did not make it to Beeper’s app — they went to Google Messages instead.
The company is also hoping to gain trust by building in public, with 50-plus projects that it’s published to GitHub with the open source code that goes into the app.
Founded in 2020, Beeper comes from former Y Combinator partner Eric Migicovsky and CTO Brad Murray, previously of wholesale marketplace startup Faire and Fitbit.
The original article contains 1,306 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Are their messages from their app going to show blue to iMessage users or something? Cuz I don't see why you'd need to reverse engineer that otherwise. Even then... How hard is it to spoof a Mac address or other hardware identifier that says the message came from an iPhone?
The fact this is even an issue is just ridiculous to begin with. If you give that much of a shit: Use a different god damn messenger that treats everyone the same.
afaik, their while thing is that they do everything on-device, so your device is the only one with access to your messages