The NEW Peerio: A Brand New Architecture. A Brand New Experience.
We’ve been busy building a powerful new architecture for Peerio. Today, we present the all new redesigned Peerio.
From the start, our mission has been to create a messaging and file storage app that gives you control over your privacy. The first version was an end-to-end encryption platform for low volume, one-on-one communication. As we grew, we realized that Peerio could do a lot better than that. So we committed the past year to a radical overhaul.
We built the new Peerio with a simple vision: a secure communication platform as intuitive as a consumer app, with the capabilities to support busy organizations.
Peerio is now faster, more secure, and designed to serve individuals and communities. Your data is still encrypted everywhere — on your device, in transit, and on our server. We still can’t ever access any of your content, even if we wanted to. Oh, it also has a gorgeous new interface that we’re pretty damn proud of.
We’re thrilled to finally share all this with you.
High Level Performance
When it comes to encrypted communication, speed is often the biggest drawback. When you’re communicating in real time, over multiple conversations and across different devices, encrypting and decrypting each message becomes a lot of extra work for your machine. This can lead to frustrating slowdowns and crashes.
The new Peerio has assembled the heavy mechanics of the app — encryption, data storage, interaction with the server — into a core library, separate from the user interfaces on your desktop and mobile. This way, your devices only process data that actually needs to be processed. The core library also simplifies communication between the Peerio app on your mobile and the one on your desktop, so all that information is synchronized without delay.
More simply, a lot of under-the-hood technical work has made the new Peerio significantly faster, more reliable, and improved synchronization between devices.
Multiple Levels of Access
End-to-end encryption usually works by securing your message or file with a lock. You and your recipients have the key to open the lock, and no one else has access to that document. This is simple enough for one-to-one communications, but it can get messy once more people get involved. So, encryption can be a challenge for organization’s who need to be able to address the ebb and flow of people joining and leaving the team.
We wanted to rearchitect Peerio to make sure you can safely loop someone into a conversation, control who gets access to a conversation’s history, and revoke access to file based on confidentiality requirements (or maybe that was just accidentally sent 😶).
So, we designed a system we call KegDB, an innovative way to manage multiple levels of access to encrypted conversations and files.
KegDB groups communication between users into databases with different sharing permissions, each with a kind of meta-key. While it’s not all implemented yet, this gives us the power to develop customized access to different teams within an organization. Users will be able to do things like:
- Add and remove people from encrypted conversations
- Control access to conversation history
- Track membership changes within a group conversation and identify suspicious account activity for your contacts
- Edit messages you’ve already sent
- Create shared folders for your team
- Have dedicated “guest” roles for people who may only be working with you for a short time
All of this totally end-to-end encrypted, pretty cool, eh?
Other goodness 👌
Besides those major architectural upgrades, our team wanted to make sure we addressed some of the biggest priorities our users (that’s you!) have been asking for. So…
We poured hundreds of hours into researching, testing, and building a beautiful new interface and user experience. We worked with wonderful folks like the USABLE Project, Simply Secure, and dozens of individuals to ensure Peerio isn’t just intuitive, it’s fun.
We came up with more ways to protect our server from malicious users, and our users from malicious servers. Nipping any badness in the bud.
We made file sizes unlimited(!!!), so you can upload anything. Okay, fine, we maxed out at 7000GB files.
Weak or unstable data connections won’t need to worry, as uploads and downloads can now pause and automatically resume based on your connection.
Developer? As a proudly open source project, you can check out the new code on GitHub and leave sweet heart-emoji filled comments for our team, or even contribute to the app!
Generally, we can’t wait to show you what we’re working on for the future. All that time we spent redesigning a better backend for Peerio also sets the groundwork for awesome features, add-ons, and generally fun things that we’ll be releasing soon.
Download the brand new Peerio, and join us for the journey!