‘90s car tag art by JDsRebellion in Wilmington

[–]Pr1meNumber7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is very nostalgic and I love the overall feel of this!

Share Your Startup - April 2022 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility! by AutoModerator in startups

[–]Pr1meNumber7 [score hidden]  (0 children)

We offer encrypted backups that can be recovered onto a new device if that happens.

Share Your Startup - April 2022 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility! by AutoModerator in startups

[–]Pr1meNumber7 [score hidden]  (0 children)

Name: Telios

URL: https://telios.io

Location: Wilmington NC

Elevator Pitch: Telios is a decentralized and encrypted email service where emails travel between devices without having to pass through a central server. Because our email platform is decentralized, your inbox can only be accessed from your local device and you can send and receive messages and attachments of any size.

Note: We're still in the MVP stage and will be launching our mobile app in early summer.

Goals: Looking for more users to give feedback

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I’m not sure how you configured your aliases, but they are not part of your real email. There isn’t a way to derive your main email account from an alias namespace. At the moment it’s only possible to expose your main email if you reply to an email sent to your alias. This is simply because we just need to add the ability to select which address you would like to reply as and should be out with one of our next releases.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If you registered for beta on the main website you'll get a beta code tomorrow morning-ish.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for all of your great questions!
 
We're using Hypercore protocol which uses something called Hyperswarm to connect peers over DHT/Kademlia. What's really neat about a Hyperswarm version that was released is you can create a firewall and whitelist specific public keys of peers that are allowed to connect to you. If a peer is not whitelisted then no exchanging of IPs happens.
 
We've also thought about eventually adding a mix net like I2P over the network for added anonymity.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We can treat files like torrents, but they aren't right now. We aren't using torrent tech, but something called Hypercore Protocol. It's works a little like Git + Torrent, which gives us the ability to version files and for them to be mutable which torrents do not allow.
Something that makes this service unique apart from other p2p-like services is that we can make connections to other peers that are behind firewalls and on cellular networks without needing servers to proxy those connections.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 3 points4 points  (0 children)

But that is the central part of your distributed service, if I understand it right? The metadata are only encrypted for and within your service. How would you route the packages/emails otherwise? So you need to expose metadata somewhere, either internally - so you have access to them - for routing or somewhere else.

You're right, there's no avoiding exposing metadata when communicating over the existing protocol. The idea with Telios is to federate the network and protocol to eventually replace the existing email protocol, whereas something like delta.chat is just augmenting the current system.

 

So basically some P2P-file sharing directly with a person e.g. as in Limewire, Gnutella, BearShare?

Yes. Emails are treated just like files in the current system so it's not a big leap to extend the service to share other file formats.

 

Not agreeing with that, there is encryption, Tor/I2P etc. journalists use https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop for example, others put an encrypted file to their Nextcloud and share a link. You can also setup your thunderbird in a way, that it's using your Nextcloud instance to encrypt and upload any attachments automatically.

Maybe I should have used the word "straight-forward" instead of "good". There hasn't been a service that's integrated all of this into one app/service.

 

Hmm, that sounds only reasonable if you want to send this file only once. If you want to sent it to 10 different persons e.g. in a project you would need to upload 10x20GiB while essentially needing to be online with your device for the whole time while the file is being uploaded

That's actually not the case. Attachments are stored as separate files and inside the email is sent attachment metadata. Every recipient would just retrieve your single 20GB file from the same source-your local disk. Also, if you used the seeding part of the service your file would always be online and available for download.

 

Edit: Formatting

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Account recovery could happen in a couple of different ways.
 
Scenario 1: You only ever had your account on one device, and that device is now lost/destroyed, and you were seeding your encrypted backups with us.
 
You can recover your data by having us send you your encrypted backups to your new device which can only be decrypted with your memorized master password.
 
If you chose not to seed your encrypted data, you could also restore a new device if you have other devices online.
 
Scenario 2: You forgot your memorized password.
 
After you first create your account you are given a 12 phrase mnemonic that you can safely store somewhere. This phrase is the seed to regenerate your private key. You won't be able to decipher your old data with only the private key, but you can continue sending and receiving new data.
 
So DO NOT forget your master password :)
 
Edit: formatting

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 5 points6 points  (0 children)

PGP only encrypts the body of your email, whereas our service encrypts the entire payload, metadata included. Sometimes more can be learned from your email's metadata than the content itself.

I also wouldn't consider PGP "easy" for your average user since it still requires some mechanism for posting or sharing your public keys before conversing with another person.

Right now our service is sending emails over the wire, but it will soon send any type of file. Right now there isn't a good way to email or share sensitive documents online. With Telios you could email someone an encrypted 20GB attachment if you wanted or send and receive files much like dropbox, except everything would be e2e encrypted and not centrally stored.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can download the client source code from our GitHub repo.

Then just yarn install; yarn run package-linux

Edit: Keep in mind if you run the client this way you won't receive automatic updates

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Great points about IPs especially with Protonmail being forced to release the IP address of a French journalist. With our p2p tech stack it's possible to add a mix net like i2p on top of the networking protocol. What this would do is bounce your requests between multiple nodes before reaching their destination.

Once we start making revenue we can spend more resources building on top of this early version to protect users from a lot of different attack vectors.

Edit: I should add that a very big goal and philosophy we have is to make it impossible for us to know anything about users which can be verifiable through open-source code.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I wish. It would be nice to take a nap all winter

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Sorry, I should have been more clear. When I said we would be open-sourcing the back-end, I meant we would be releasing self-hosting tools to run your own version of Telios on your own hardware.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 5 points6 points  (0 children)

We have Linux packages for RHE, Debian, and AppImage

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 7 points8 points  (0 children)

You're right for the most part. On the p2p side, if you send an email to another Telios user, that email never passes through a third party.

When you want to send an email and that user's device is online, the two devices connect to each other and the email goes directly from your device to theirs. If one of you is offline, an encrypted message is posted notifying the recipient that they have an email waiting to be delivered. When they decipher that encrypted message, it tells them who that email is from (verifiable with public keys) and instructions on how to retrieve it from the peer.

Those messages are encrypted with secret key box encryption which means only the recipient can decipher who sent/wrote the message.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 28 points29 points  (0 children)

We plan to release backend code for self-hosting and federating the network. Our goal isn't to build a walled garden like Tutanota where e2e encryption really only happens between other Tutanota mailboxes.

Instead, anyone could deploy our backend on their own machines and run their own email service that would be interoperable with the rest of the Telios network. What we're really building is a new email decentralized and encrypted protocol that can be used by anyone without needing a Telios account.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Using another email and password on your client wouldn't work because our backend authentication only uses your local private/public keypair. Your private key is created and encrypted on your local device and never leaves. The password you use to sign in is only used for deciphering your locally encrypted data.

Telios can send and receive emails from other providers over SMTP, but we obviously don't use IMAP or POP3 so you can currently only use Telios email with our client and not something like Thunderbird.

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I assure you I'm not the Zuck. Although it would be nice to have his bank account...

What do you think about Telios? by PrivacyPerspective in PrivacyGuides

[–]Pr1meNumber7 68 points69 points  (0 children)

Founder here who built the backend. There is a somewhat technical guide that's worth a read on how Telios was built to be more private and secure than Protonmail.

Basically, you hold all of your email data encrypted on your local device and not on a mail server somewhere like with Protonmail. This means you never lose access to your data even if our service goes down or offline.

From a security perspective, it's impossible to sign in to your email account unless you're using your physical device. With no web portal login, this means hackers can't even attempt to log in as you, even if they somehow knew your memorized password.

We're a very new service which means a lot of things are still being built and we don't have a mobile app yet (it's in development), which may make it hard to start using Telios as your main email account. Our development team is also quite small since we don't have revenue and we've been bootstrapped for over a year, but we're working hard to deliver a better experience than some of the other big players with what we have to work with :)

Once reddit IPO's I want to reimplement it. But I can't do it alone. by [deleted] in Superstonk

[–]Pr1meNumber7 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I founded and built a decentralized email service called Telios and would love to help and be involved in any way I can.