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Ask HN: Encrypted Chat, on-the-fly?

5 points by kyanite ↗ HN
Consider this scenario: you're talking to someone on one of the common social media platforms, where your chat is unencrypted/logged, and would like to talk about something more private.

Is there a service somewhere where you could simply send them a link, to open up a new tab in their browser, and commence a encrypted chat session right away (without them having to do any clicking other than open the link)?

Even an unencrypted service like this would be useful imho.

4 comments

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lutusp
> Is there a service somewhere where you could simply send them a link, to open up a new tab in their browser, and commence a encrypted chat session right away ...

It might not actually exist in packaged form, but Secure Shell is everywhere now and it will do this easily, with an appropriate setup. Secure Shell relies on the same basic scheme as most modern encryption methods -- public-key cryptography.

With Secure Shell, one would have the normal peer-to-peer chat scheme, with one difference -- the communications channel would be encrypted using the SSH protocol, and both participants would have exchanged validations.

For a round-table chat with more than two participants, it becomes more complicated.

Wait, hold on -- I just thought of something simpler that does exist. You could use a Secure Sockets Layer approach. You would send your friend an URL preceded by "https://" and identifying a server that has a chat server and that supports the SSL protocol. That would be much simpler and it already exists. If you had a chat server running on an SSL server, each participant would be linked up securely, and the round table issue would be resolved.

walshie4
https://crypto.cat/ is a potential solution to this problem, add Tor and you can consider yourself fairly safe.
cyphunk
crypto cat requires a plugin to be installed in your browser. it's a good close option but not exactly one link away.
lozf
Apologies for late reply. Visit https://vline.com - it will display a unique URL for your private chat using WebTRC (so encrypted) with some extra goodness to get around the NAT issues that can cause issues with similar services. Just paste your unique URL to your chat partner.

Issues are that due to webrtc it requires a fairly recent version of Chrome or Firefox, and the use has one extra click to allow access to their Mic & Webcam.