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I'm sorry to derail the conversation with my lack of technical understanding but how do we protect metadata? If we have two devices (say Alice's phone and Bob'
by newjersey 11y ago
I'm sorry to derail the conversation with my lack of technical understanding but how do we protect metadata?
If we have two devices (say Alice's phone and Bob's phone) that are sending messages to each other, how do we make sure nobody knows who is talking to whom? The answer seems non-trivial to me.
Could we use Alice's and Bob's public keys to encrypt the message and then send them to the entire network, relying on the security of the encryption (and acknowledging that a third part can read all messages any way)? Is there a way to look at a public key and an encrypted message and say that yes, this message was encrypted with this key? It seems that we'd be paying through the nose in terms of throughput capacity (and processing capacity as everyone would have to take in everyone else's packets) if we wanted to maintain metadata privacy this way. I'm sure this is not what you had in mind. Can you please elaborate on how we can secure metadata?
- williamcotton 11y agoThat's essentially how BitMessage works, although with an added proof-of-work functionality to reduce spam.
- khed 11y agoI don't think the protocols are that similar. Bitmessage is a "eveyone gets every message sent by anyone" type of situation. Bote is a mixnetwork with a dht cache. Ricochet is also built on a mix network but with out a dht cache. Pond uses servers.
- napoleond 11y agohttps://pond.imperialviolet.org https://pond.imperialviolet.org
- vox_mollis 11y agoMay I suggest taking a look at https://ricochet.im/ https://ricochet.im/ for exactly this.
- khed 11y agoRicochet is great :) Very easy to use. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult if not impossible to make it support group chat.
- khed 11y agoBitmessage hides the metadata by sending a given message from one person to another person to everyone in the network (it obviously has scaling problems!). Because everyone gets every message you can't really see the metadata. I2p-bote routes the messages through multiple intermediaries with layered encryption so that no intermediary knows both the ultimate sender or ultimate recipient. Pond works by running servers over tor (a mixnet). When you send a message it doesn't go to the server you have service through it goes directly to the recipients server. Ricochet sets up your own server on tor that you are hosting. There is also Pir-Tor. It attempts anonymity by using the secure multiparty communication combined with PIR to attain provable anonymity.
- simoncion 11y ago> ... how do we protect metadata? By using traffic obfuscating systems like TOR or Mixmaster.