Vuash

Send secret messages safely.

1 follower

Send secret messages safely.

1 follower

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Vuash is a web app that lets you send encrypted messages that can only be opened once. It's free and open source.

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Launch tags:Productivity•Messaging•Tech

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ArtSquare

I have one question for you, team @vua_sh, http://www.vua.sh/745ee37b-fe5f-... @rmasoni

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@elizabethhunker Now nobody will know what the question was 😄

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10yr ago

ArtSquare

@rmasoni The winner of that glory will, and it will haunt them.

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@elizabethhunker This actually reminds me that another use for Vuash I forgot to mention is handing out free prizes. Whoever clicks first wins the prize, that might be a game key for example.

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10yr ago

ArtSquare

@rmasoni Oh my god - shoulda lead with that!

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10yr ago

Just For Today by Fred (Not Freud)

Cool idea. I used to have a similar concept on http://Secretpo.st with the addition of a countdown option. So users would get a link that would say "You can read this in X days, X hours, X minutes, X seconds" and whatnot.

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@avizuber Oh, cool! I've seen that feature in other apps. Have yours been down for long? Maybe it was the one where I saw it as the name is very familiar. As we developed client-side encryption in version 2, which we think downed attack opportunities to a minimum, we decided against adding more features to keep it very very simple.

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10yr ago

Just For Today by Fred (Not Freud)

@rmasoni Sounds awesome. I think mine has been down for over a year at this point. There are some traces of it here: http://launchriot.com/category/m...

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10yr ago

You did a really nice job, I could see it being use in different cases where messenger or telegram are not acceptable.

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@qahersalah I use it very frequently, hence why we ended up making it. We made Vuash in a time when most services we used for web development didn't offer multiuser accounts, so we had to exchange login credentials quite often. Thankfully that has not been the case anymore, so I use it mostly for other less sensible things now.

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10yr ago

i think you did a fine job designing it, but i also have to question its purpose. The workflow needed includes 1) a web browser, 2) the service Vuash itself and 3) a messenger of choice. If one of these 3 elements break, the entire security breaks. Therefore, Id argue that using a messenger alone makes it more secure to different kinds of attacks. Vuash doesnt ensure Integrity or Authenticity. A Man-in-the-Middle could receive the secret link, read it, create a new message and forward that new link. By doing so the Attacker has gained the knowledge of that message and is also able to modify it. If a third party isnt able to intervene but at least to read the communication between two parties, the receiver would be able to tell if the secret message has been opened beforehand. thats good, but there are already hundreds of technologies that do just that. With Open Whisper Systems powering apps like Signal, WhatsApp, Allo (not enabled by default) and the Facebook Messenger I'd argue that you are definitely save enough by simply sticking to these tools. I do not believe that including the 3 elements I mentioned above in 1 workflow youll make your communication any more secure. Probably quite the opposite.

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@gopietz You're right, if the sender's system is compromised in a way that it leaks the link to someone else that might be interested in it, Vuash ceases to be useful. Vuash doesn't identify who created the message or who's intended to open it either, so in that sense of the word there's indeed no authenticity and as a consequence no integrity as there's no way to compare the original intent to the end result. A way to mitigate that would be requiring a password in order to unlock the link, but that's too complicated. I think the nice thing is if both ends are relatively safe, not suffering from sniffing and/or directed attacks, Vuash turns out to be quite useful in my experience. Even if WhatsApp and others offer end-to-end encryption — that's orders of magnitude more robust than ours —, they're not designed for the same purpose, they're meant for conversations, for keeping a history of back-and-forth dialogue. I would never *feel* secure typing credentials in a messenger app, as there are social implications in this case. Yes, the environment around the app can make it useless, but that's how it works with most other apps as well. I use Vuash very frequently myself, and I think it works great when both parties are aware of its value and how to properly make use of it. Not sure if I was able to clear some things up, so please let me know what you think.

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

Hello, I'm the creator and designer. I'll be happy to answer questions you might have about Vuash. The project started as a little tool for me and my colleagues to exchange wifi passwords, environment secret keys etc. during our daily job routine. There were a couple other similar services available at the time (that we knew of), but we didn't like their UI, UX and overall tech, so we decided to make our own. The first version needed SSL to encrypt requests because the encryption was all done in the server, but since version 2.0 we don't need it anymore, as the only thing that touches the server is the already client-encrypted message. You can read more on how it works here: https://github.com/current/vuash... Vuash is free to use, supported by donations, and open source.

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10yr ago

AI Starter | An AI "Biz-in-a-Box"

How does it differentiate itself from, say , Telegram messenger?

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@arunpattnaik It's not a messenger. In messenger apps, there's a chat history, and messages must be manually deleted if you don't want them available for look up. I like to think of Vuash as more of real world telegram, or self-destructing letters from action movies.

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10yr ago

Feature request: a "copy url" button for the message. Capturing that on mobile is a pain

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@alex_delegard I feel your pain. I tried several ways of easing this process, but this plain text box was the best I could come up with in the end to serve both desktop and mobile. Copy buttons are usually made in Flash or, more recently, with JavaScript that isn't yet widely supported. One thing I could try that would work on most devices is having the URL be an actual link, so you can long press on mobile and copy or open in a new tab and copy from that. I'm open to suggestions.

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10yr ago

@rmasoni @alex_delegard If browser support is the issue why not just provide both a text box and copy button?

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10yr ago

Vuash

Maker

@samayres1992 This adds clutter and broken functionality if we don't go out of our way to make it show only in supported browsers. I think we might go with the “long press” route in the end, as I've seen some big names using it.

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10yr ago

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