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by asdkhadsj 2524 days ago
As people are discussing Keybase for teams and whatnot - could anyone comment on Keybase for individuals, families, etc?

My family are debating moving to Matrix (and away from iMessage). I had briefly debates Keybase due to some interesting features. Anyone have experience with Keybase for families and individuals?

3 comments

Have you considered Wire? What are your thoughts? Runs on many platforms, sign up with phone number or email, and of course e2ee.
It's OK, notifications collapsing is somewhat wonky for some people and some of my friends complain about the app's performance vs something like Facebook but given the security model it will never be as fast.

disclaimer: I work for Keybase

Appreciate your response. After finding out how Keybase is funded, the model has me worried about relying on the future of a magically[1] funded platform compared to something I could self-host like Matrix.

Do you have any insight on why I shouldn't be concerned?

[1]: since I don't have clear funding motivations I'm referring to it as magical.

Why move away from iMessage? It's end-to-end encrypted.
Either one of:

- iOS only

or

- an extremely-crypto/privacy-aware family who is concerned that although end-to-end encrypted, there is no out-of-band user-validated key exchange (e.g through a digit code or QR-Code) or prior validation (e.g per-key TOFU) of the other party's identity or update to their keys. Which means that theoretically Apple could insert a new key in the user's set (there is a key per user's device for perfect backward/forward secrecy†) anytime to MITM/intercept messages and you would not be able to monitor it††.

† This is obviously defeated by Messages in iCloud (which you can disable) but the iMessage protocol has this built in.

†† Of course if there was some feature like that, Apple could also make such a key hidden in some way because they also control the Messages app code.

Because I'm planning on moving to Linux, and I dislike typing a lot on my iPhone. So I need a desktop client to talk with my family/etc.

I'd prefer to keep iMessage, but you know, walled garden. Lol.