Introducing Confer, an end-to-end AI assistant that just works.

Moxie Marlinspike—the pseudonym of an engineer who set a new standard for private messaging with the creation of the Signal Messenger—is now aiming to revolutionize AI chatbots in a similar way.

His latest brainchild is Confer, an open source AI assistant that provides strong assurances that user data is unreadable to the platform operator, hackers, law enforcement, or any other party other than account holders. The service—including its large language models and back-end components—runs entirely on open source software that users can cryptographically verify is in place.

Data and conversations originating from users and the resulting responses from the LLMs are encrypted in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents even server administrators from peeking at or tampering with them. Conversations are stored by Confer in the same encrypted form, which uses a key that remains securely on users’ devices.

Like Signal, the under-the-hood workings of Confer are elegant in their design and simplicity. Signal was the first end-user privacy tool that made using it a snap. Prior to that, using PGP email or other options to establish encrypted channels between two users was a cumbersome process that was easy to botch. Signal broke that mold. Key management was no longer a task users had to worry about. Signal was designed to prevent even the platform operators from peering into messages or identifying users’ real-world identities.

...read more at arstechnica.com