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jeremyckahn / chitchatter

Secure peer-to-peer chat that is serverless, decentralized, and ephemeral
https://chitchatter.im/
GNU General Public License v2.0
1.57k stars 206 forks source link

Support for hardened browsers #373

Open retroroo opened 2 weeks ago

retroroo commented 2 weeks ago

ChitChatter has been tested not working on the following browsers:

Firefox Based: Librewolf, Mull Chromium based: vanadium, mulch

It has been observed to work with chrome and firefox on default settings.

It would be nice for this to work out of the box on these privacy oriented browsers. I understand the reliance on webrtc. If there is a better or more hardened way to make it, it would be appreciated as webrtc has a large attack surface from a server -> client attack. Also vanadium DOES support webrtc so im not sure why it didnt work there.

Many thanks for your hard work!

jeremyckahn commented 2 weeks ago

Thanks for testing and the kind words @retroroo! Supporting hardened browsers would likely require a substantial redesign of Chitchatter's core functionality. Perhaps more significantly, moving away from WebRTC would require depending on a central server to facilitate peer connections. This would make Chitchatter no longer P2P or decentralized. It would also make the project largely irrelevant, as there are many competing centralized alternatives that offer at least as good of a feature set and UX.

To make Chitchatter work in the hardened browsers you mentioned, I think we'd need to find some way for them to allow WebRTC (and based on your Vanadium findings, other browser features as well). I don't have any experience in doing that, and I'm not sure what it might take as I don't use such browsers. Do you have any suggestions on how that might be achieved @retroroo?