BitTorrent has provided additional details on Bleep, an encrypted voice and messaging application which, unlike similar solutions, doesn’t rely on central servers.
According to BitTorrent Bleep project head Farid Fadaie, the application has two main components: the engine, which is the company’s new peer-to-peer communications platform, and the user interface.
“The engine for Bleep has been built to serve as the back-end to any chat and voice application, offering the potential to change how people all around the world communicate,” Fadaie said in a blog post.
He believes that other similar solutions expose users’ communications due to the way they handle metadata. Bleep on the other hand doesn’t have a central repository of metadata, and BitTorrent doesn’t track or store any information on communications. Fadaie says they’re not even storing data temporarily.
Another advantage of Bleep is that those who want to communicate through the app find the individuals they’re looking for through other nodes in the network, and the company doesn’t track or store lookup data. Finally, all communications, including links between nodes, are encrypted using protocols like Curve25519, Ed25519, Salsa20, Poly1305 and others, Fadaie explained.
Bleep, which has been in the works since September 2013 under the name BitTorrent Chat, is currently in closed pre-alpha. Users who wish to try out the app can sign up for an invitation. The application currently works only on Windows 7 and Windows 8, but the company is working on extending support to mobile platforms as well.
While BitTorrent’s app is still in development, there are other secure communications apps that are already available. For instance, Silent Circle’s solutions allow customers to make encrypted phone calls in a total of 79 countries. For people who want a free program, Open Whisper Systems has just announced a new iPhone app called Signal, which is fully compatible with RedPhone, a secure calling Android application developed by the same open source software group.