Encrypted Messages With Bitmessage on the Raspberry Pi

Hello everybody.

In this instructables you will learn how to send encrypted messages from your Raspberry Pi with BItmessage.

Lets start!!

BItmessage is according to its wiki page a " P2P communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide "non-content" data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs"

Bitmessage wiki page

These are the parts that you need for this instructable.

Hardware:

1.A Raspberry pi (I used my Raspberry Pi 1 but i strongly recommend a Raspberry Pi 2 or 3)

Software:

1.Raspbian latest image fully upgraded

2.BItmessage

Lets continue building now our software.

Lets start with the software upgrade.

1.We need a fully upgraded system so open a terminal and type the well known commands sudo apt-get update and after it finishes sudo apt-get upgrade.

The upgrade may take few seconds or hours. Depends on how updated your Raspberry Pi image is.

Lets continue and install all the necessary dependencies.

1.Again open a terminal and type the following command sudo apt-get install python openssl git python-qt4

Ok it is time now to install Bitmessage. This is very simple and it takes only one command from the command line.

Just type git clone https://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage $HOME/PyBitmessage and after a few minutes the software is downloaded to your home folder under the file Bitmessage.

To run Bitmessage is also very simple. From the terminal go to your Bitmessage folder with the cd command, then cd src and finally type sudo python bitmessagemain.py

Thats it. BItmessage is up and running. Lets see now how to send messages.

The first thing you must do when starting Bitmessage is to create a new identity.

At the main window click on .New Identity.There are 2 ways to create a new identity.

1.Use a random number generator

2.Use a pass phrase.

I used the pass phrase by using a word and Bitmessage created 8 different addresses.

The second thing you must do after creating the new identity is to port forward at your Access Point that provides you Internet the port 8444 at your Raspberry PIs IP address.

If you correctly port forward the port you will see a green cycle at the right corner of Bitmessage and you will able then to send your encrypted messages, which is very simple to do from the Send tab.Just ask the Bitmessage id of the person you want to send the message, enter it at the To section of you message. If the id is correct you will be able to send your message. If not Bitmessage will inform you that this is not a valid id.

That's it.