Is Briar safe to use?

Briar is one of the safest mainstream messengers for high-threat, anti-surveillance use: it is fully peer-to-peer with no Briar servers, requires no phone number or email, encrypts messages end-to-end by default with forward secrecy, stores data encrypted on-device behind a password, and routes internet sync over Tor to hide IP and relationship metadata. It is open source and was independently audited by Cure53 (2017), which called the code 'rather exceptional' and recommended it for use; later academic review (ETH Zürich, 2023) found and helped fix a non-forward-secret handshake (CVE-2023-33982, CVSS 5.9, patched in 1.5.3 — and only weakly exploitable in practice because it runs inside Tor's own encryption). Caveats: the public audit is old and predates the desktop client, the desktop app is still beta, there is no iOS version, and there is no duress/decoy mode — and like all classical messengers it is not post-quantum. For threat models centered on censorship, network surveillance, and metadata, Briar is an excellent, defensible choice.