Less than an year after announcing plans to build a secure chat system, BitTorrent yesterday unveiled its new privacy and security focused messaging platform Bleep. Unlike other popular chat clients like Hangouts, AIM, or Skype, Bleep lets you exchange information without the need for any central servers.
"Why Bleep, you might ask? Well, basically, we never see your messages or metadata. As far as we’re concerned, anything you say is “bleep” to us", said Jahee Lee, Senior Product Manager at BitTorrent, in a blog post.
Bleep uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT), the same technique that decentralizes torrents for BitTorrent and uTorrent. In addition, the chat client also offers end-to-end encryption that relies on advanced encryption protocols such as curve25519, ed25519, salsa20, poly1305, making it very secure.
Lee said that the application could prove to be a great tool for friends who want to keep their conversations private, journalists who want to privately communicate with their sources, private communiques among diplomats, and businesses who want to keep communications confidential, safe from leaks, and safe from industrial espionage.
The decentralized architecture used by Bleep can be used by other SIP-compatible clients as well. “As long as the messaging application is using SIP it should be straight-forward, in theory, to switch over from a server-based client to our platform”, said BitTorrent’s Director of Communications Christian Averill, adding that the company is open to talk to others who are interested in using its P2P technology for messaging.
You can create a Bleep account via an email or mobile phone number. There is also an option to sign up without the need to provide any personal details. The application is in pre-alpha and the current release only works on Windows 7 and 8. The company warns that there are some known bugs, and expects testers to find some more.
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