This works pretty much as you’d expect (and is encrypted naturally). Yes, you can have direct chat with other users. A fascinating read if you’re a security geek!Īlso, there was an announcement earlier that Keybase may switch to using the Stellar blockchain rather than Bitcoin, but so far no further details. The Keybase Security pages have a wealth of more detail. To sum up, making unauthorised changes to the data is close to impossible. I’ve skipped a lot of the more technical details here, but basically the server has a global Merkle tree structure, the root of which is published on the Bitcoin blockchain. (These chains are (partially) cached on the various clients and, at a later stage, other servers which gives a decentralized chain of signatures.) With every change of the Merkle tree, the server signs and publishes this root. The server tracks these signature chains with a global Merkle tree. All these signatures and any changes to them are stored on a signature chain. This includes not just the user’s public key but also the connections to their other social accounts. Keybase stores the public signatures for it’s users on it’s server. It’s the file sharing that is particularly useful, the ability to put a file in to my public, private or team folder, send the link to others and know that only those with the right ‘keys’ will be able to view or modify the file. Instead of creating a Web of Trust through face-to-face key signing parties we use our existing social network accounts to do that for us. In this new internet world, our identity is online and, to a certain extent, who we are is who we are on Twitter/Facebook or whatever. By tying your Keybase account with your twitter/github/reddit/hn accounts, you can build up a reasonably solid proof of identity. There is a chat facility and there is file sharing, individually and for teams. Keybase is an app that will run on your computer, phone and tablet that will encrypt all communications using your private keys and allow others to verify your identity before, and while, communicating. Keybase is an attempt to remove the friction from this experience. Public key cryptography is about 40 years old now, and yet it is still frustratingly difficult to use. (You can even use existing GPG keys if you wish). In their original mission statement, back in 2015, they described Keybase as “bring public key crypto to everyone” and in a sense it is a wrapper around what the old bearded fellows may have called GPG/PGP cryptography. Yes, it is a security app but it ain’t gonna replace Slack anytime soon. Think of it as “Slack for the whole world”, they suggest. The Keybase home page introduces itself as “a security app for phones and computers”. I made some notes as well, here they are. This weekend there was a little time, and I had a job for Keybase so it was time to work out what it could do and read up on some of the features. I setup my account, added some other accounts and created a solid identity. I installed Keybase a while back but haven’t time to play around with it much since then.
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