

The maximum range between devices is about 300 feet, or 100 meters. It’s the same technology when you use Bluetooth to transfer music or images from one device to another. Two devices are able to use Bluetooth to set up a secure peer-to-peer connection.

Instead, they rely on Bluetooth or direct Wi-Fi connection. The off-grid messenger apps, also known as mesh messengers, don’t need access to public infrastructure like cell phone towers or internet to send messages from one phone to another. Offline messaging is a new trend in secure communication. What is offline messaging, and how does it work? Can offline messengers replace messaging apps? Spoiler: no!.From camping trips to political protests: when off-grid messaging comes in handy.What is offline messaging, and how does it work?.SimpleX clients only relay traffic from known connection and cannot be used by an attacker to amplify the traffic in the whole network.Offline messaging apps: send and receive texts without internet P2P networks may be vulnerable to DRDoS attack, when the clients can rebroadcast and amplify traffic, resulting in network-wide denial of service. SimpleX network has no server discoverability, it is fragmented and operates as multiple isolated sub-networks, making network-wide attacks impossible. Known measures to mitigate it require either a centralized component or expensive proof of work. WebSockets.Īll known P2P networks may be vulnerable to Sybil attack, because each node is discoverable, and the network operates as a whole. SimpleX is transport agnostic - it can work over standard web protocols, e.g. P2P implementations can be blocked by some Internet providers (like BitTorrent). SimpleX uses out-of-band messages or, in some cases, pre-existing secure and trusted connections for the initial key exchange.

P2P does not solve MITM attack problem, and most existing implementations do not use out-of-band messages for the initial key exchange. SimpleX design, unlike most P2P networks, has no global user identifiers of any kind, even temporary, and only uses temporary pairwise identifiers, providing better anonymity and metadata protection.

In P2P networks the message is passed through O(log N) nodes sequentially, using nodes chosen by the algorithm. SimpleX has both better delivery guarantee and lower latency than P2P, because the message can be redundantly passed via several servers in parallel, using the servers chosen by the recipient. DHT designs have to balance delivery guarantee and latency. P2P networks rely on some variant of DHT to route messages. P2P messaging protocols and apps have various problems that make them less reliable than SimpleX, more complex to analyse, and vulnerable to several types of attack.
