February 2014

WireOver - Fast, Free, Secure File Sending

WireOver is a Mac, Windows and Linux application for sending and receiving files. It's easy to use and very low friction, requiring only entry of an email address and click on a received web link to set up. Receiving an unsolicited send is even easier, as acting on the receipt of the notifying email naturally associates that email with the recipient.

Transfers (by subscribers) use perfect forward secrecy, and can be entirely asynchronous, so sender and receiver need never be online at the same time. Of course if they are, then transmission goes as fast as the physical network allows.

We built the backend and client mainly in Python, supporting Mac and Windows back to 10.5 and XP respectively. For Linux we support 32 and 64 bit Ubuntu 12 and later.

Much of my focus has been on keeping OS variations from impacting the main body of the code. To that end, we're using wxWidgets to abstract the GUI, and I've implemented such native code as needed to interface with unwrapped aspects of the OS and third-party libraries. In some cases the fluent Python bindings to OS facilities just aren't fast enough, and native code is used there also.

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