NEWS FLASH: Keybase Exploding Messages

June 20, 2018

Hi everyone. Starting today, you can put a short fuse on your Keybase chat messages. This works for 1-on-1 chats and also inside team, group, and community channels.

demonstration from my brother

We recommend your most intimate and most corporate messages get the exploding treatment. Each end of the professionalism spectrum. Don't put that dank meme or Income Statement in plaintext, people. Put it in Keybase, so it's encrypted.

And if you'd like it to be temporary, make it explode.

Some details:

They blow up

When the time comes, KA-BOOM

When the countdown hits zero, everyone throws away the plaintext and ciphertext.

Exploding messages have forward secrecy

Forward secrecy means your apps use temporary "ephemeral" keys that are thrown away.

To be clear, all Keybase messages - not just exploding ones - are end-to-end encrypted. No one can read them without compromising one of your devices.

Forward secrecy is something extra. It protects you if someone in the future steals your device's key and also has access to old recorded messages, say by scooping up ciphertexts as a man-in-the-middle.

Forward secrecy works extra well with timed messages because your device destroys both the decryption keys and plaintext.

Splosions from the command line

You can also send exploding messages from your terminal of choice.*

keybase chat send --exploding-lifetime "30s" friend1234 \ "Yo - meet @ 10pm under the powerlines. Bring the stuff" keybase chat send --exploding-lifetime "6h" acmecorp.finance \ "That is NO laughing matter, James."

* assuming sane choices

If you're writing a bot, you can pipe JSON to keybase chat api . Example:

{ " method ": "send" , " params ": { " options ": { " channel ": { " name ": "vegetarians.bots" } , " exploding_lifetime ": "1d" , " message ": { " body ": "smellbot has detected meat in the office foyer." } } } }

You can get more API examples with keybase chat api --help .

That's it!

Another step forward for Keybase. Cryptography for everyone.

More stuff soon,

💖 Keybase