this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
41 points (91.8% liked)

Selfhosted

39921 readers
376 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Is anybody self hosting Beeper bridges?

I'm still wary of privacy concerns, as they basically just have you log into every other service through their app (which as I understand is always going on in the closed source part of Beeper's product).

The linked GitHub README also states that the benefit of hosting their bridge setup is basically "hosting Matrix hard" which I don't necessarily believe.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Yes I'm very interested in how they claim to have a zero knowledge model but also admit that their bridges decrypt and re-encrypt messages as they pass through. It might only be an ephemeral thing but surely it's a massive, gaping target for bad actors to wire tap.

[–] sunstoned@lemmus.org 2 points 6 months ago

Hm, so it's encrypted from your beeper client to the bridge, decrypted, then re-encrypted with the outgoing platform's protocol. Seems like a good reason to host your own bridge, and a good call on it being a glaring attack surface.

Seems like the secret sauce is in how they deal with messaging platform integrations? Maybe the goal is to avoid another iMessage lawsuit. With Beeper as a proof of concept it would be cool to start adding integrations in a fully open source way (legality permitting)

[–] knF@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For what I understood the decryption/encryption process happens on the bridge. The bridge is the selfhosted component so the transformation would happen in your server and they would have no visibility over the unencrypted message.

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In a selfhosted scenario, but what about their cloud service?

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, exactly. And how do you even tell the app that you want to self host? I see no option for pointing it to a different core server/bridge.

... Unless you have to do it at the point of sign-up? I remember seeing an 'advanced' option on the login screen.

[–] knF@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's explained in the FAQ: https://www.beeper.com/faq#how-can-i-self-host-beeper I've not used the app so I don't know how practical/easy it is but they're at least offering the option, which is laudable.

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 1 points 6 months ago

Yeah I'm not disagreeing that it's audible but having read the instructions it leaves a lot of unanswered questions like the above. Presumably people with more knowledge and time than me will figure it all out and write step-by-step guides at some point.