HelpBuoy

Security and privacy

Who can see what, and why the person you help stays in charge.

HelpBuoy is built around one rule: the person at the PC decides. Here’s how that works in practice.

Nothing happens without a yes

Every session starts with a question on their screen, with the helper’s name and key fingerprint. Without Allow, a helper can’t see anything. Pressing Esc on their keyboard, or closing HelpBuoy, stops the session immediately, even if the relay were to misbehave.

HelpBuoy doesn’t start with Windows and doesn’t run in the background. When the window is closed, the PC is offline for everyone.

Small on purpose

A session can do exactly two things: send the screen to the helper, and send mouse and keyboard back. There is no channel for files, clipboard, commands or sound. What isn’t there can’t be misused.

Encrypted end to end

Every connection uses SSH with modern Ed25519 keys. Inside the connection to the relay, the desk app and the PC open a second, separate SSH connection to each other. The relay only passes it along. Whoever runs the relay sees who connected when, and how much data went through, but never the screen or the keystrokes.

Keys instead of passwords

Each desk app and each PC has its own key, made once on first start and used only for HelpBuoy. There are no accounts and no passwords to guess or leak.

  • A PC can only connect once a helper has added its key.
  • The desk app checks the PC’s key on every session, so nobody can pretend to be that PC.
  • The PC remembers each helper’s key. If a helper suddenly shows up with a different key, HelpBuoy warns before asking for permission.
  • The PC remembers the relay’s key after the first connection. If it ever changes, HelpBuoy stops and warns, and doesn’t continue until the person confirms it with you.

Your relay, not ours

There is no HelpBuoy cloud. The relay runs on a computer you control, and nothing is sent to us. The relay limits connection attempts per key and per address, so a flood of attempts from one place can’t lock out everyone else.

Open source

All of HelpBuoy is MIT-licensed and on GitHub. You don’t have to take our word for any of this.

Found a security problem? Please email us at the address on the imprint page rather than opening a public issue.