Skip to content

About

About BARGHEST

MESH is developed by BARGHEST, a non-profit, grassroots security research team working at the intersection of technology and human rights.

We are a non-profit company limited by guarantee (CLG) registered in the United Kingdom. We work in and for civil society, with most of our programmes based in East and South Asia. For U.S.-based funders, we are treated as the equivalent of a 501(c)(3) organization for grantmaking purposes.

BARGHEST is a security research organization that works to protect human rights defenders & journalists who are exposed to sophisticated mobile surveillance, malware and digital repression, particularly in East and South East Asia. We focus on communities for whom existing security ecosystems are slow, centralized, and difficult to access, and we build tools and workflows that allow them to investigate and respond to digital threats safely, even under censorship and connectivity constraints.

Our core work combines security research, software engineering, and community adoption. Technically, we design and maintain open, decentralized forensic capabilities that support self-service triage, travel integrity checks, and remote evidence collection, translating advanced reverse engineering and threat hunting methods into guided workflows that non-specialist users can operate. Programmatically, we work with regional partners, helplines, and labs to embed these tools into real-world security practices, develop consent and redaction protocols, and create operational playbooks that prioritize safety, evidentiary integrity, and local control.

Barghest’s team brings together senior experience in reverse engineering, zero-day research, and nation-state threat analysis with long-standing work in digital protection, governance, and impact within human rights organizations. We maintain and harden the technical core of our tools, steward open community infrastructure, and support partners to run decentralised, locally owned deployments. Across all of our work, our mission is to shift forensic power from closed commercial vendors and distant experts to frontline communities themselves, strengthening their autonomy, resilience, and ability to document and resist digital attacks.

Get help

Community support

Discord : Join our community for real-time chat and support : Join Discord

GitHub discussions : Ask questions and share ideas : GitHub Discussions

GitHub issues : Report bugs and request features : GitHub Issues

Direct support

For organisations requiring direct support:

Contributing

MESH is open source and welcomes contributions from the community.

Ways to contribute

Report bugs : Found a bug? Report it on GitHub Issues

Suggest features : Have an idea? Share it on GitHub Discussions

Submit code : Fix bugs or add features with pull requests

Improve documentation : Help make the docs better

Share use cases : Tell us how you're using MESH

Translate : Help translate MESH into other languages

Development

See the Contributing Guide for:

  • Development setup
  • Code style guidelines
  • Pull request process
  • Testing requirements

Acknowledgments

MESH builds on the work of many open-source projects:

  • Tailscale - For the excellent VPN protocol
  • Headscale - For the open-source control server
  • WireGuard - For the fast and secure VPN protocol
  • AmneziaWG - For censorship-resistant obfuscation
  • AndroidQF - For mobile forensics tools
  • MVT - For mobile verification toolkit

Thank you to all the developers and contributors who make these projects possible.

Ready to get started? Head to the Getting started Guide →