11 ms·

I hope they eventually develop a federated, privacy oriented messaging protocol, once the rapid technological evolution settles down. I know Moxie's position o

I hope they eventually develop a federated, privacy oriented messaging protocol, once the rapid technological evolution settles down. I know Moxie's position on federated protocols [1], but I think we must eventually agree that an open environment with a multitude of providers and implementations is the only way to provide long term privacy - any single provider is vulnerable. It would also be a very useful tool in the context of regulating communication platforms and breaking up monopolies. [1] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ Edit: emphasize federated, not open, Signal is indeed an open protocol.

tptacek 9y ago
Signal Protocol is one of the best documented cryptographic message protocols on the planet, and is accompanied by multiple GPL'd implementations. https://signal.org/docs/ https://signal.org/docs/
- baby 9y ago
  which sounds like it could be used to develop a federated protocol. I've heard there is an effort to do an RFC on the subject, but I'm not sure it uses the Signal protocols (for some reason), also there are two of them (I'm confused): * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-mls-protocol-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-mls-protocol-00 * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-mls-architecture-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-mls-architecture-01
  - vader1 9y ago
    Using OMEMO on XMPP is a federated implementation of the Signal protocol. I believe Matrix' e2e encryption is also based on it.
    - mrmondo 9y ago
      I’m really hoping OMEMO makes it into Openfire (XMPP Server) and Adium (XMPP Client) sooner rather than later, we current use OTR but OMEMO is objectively superior in every way I can see.
      - kees99 9y ago
        In general, servers should have nothing to do with end-to-end encryption, except for not actively breaking it. OMEMO in particular uses: - Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP, XEP-0163) to transport key material; and - core RFC3920/RFC6120 XMPP protocol to transport encrypted messages. Both of which are already supported by Openfire [see JM-1122]. So, as far as I can tell, Openfire is fully capable of delivering OMEMO messages right now. https://issues.igniterealtime.org/browse/JM-1122 https://issues.igniterealtime.org/browse/JM-1122 [EDIT] For Adium OMEMO support, have a look at Lurch: https://github.com/shtrom/Lurch4Adium https://github.com/shtrom/Lurch4Adium
      - synchronise 9y ago
        I don't think Adium is doing much in terms of active development sadly.
  - dTal 9y ago
    Do you consider SMS a federated protocol? https://silence.im/ https://silence.im/
    - Zash 9y ago
      SMS is federated, users of one providers can send messages to users of a different provider. Same with phone calls. Becoming a telephony provider probably takes a bit more investment than with some random Internet based service.
- kuschku 9y ago
  And Moxie disallows people from building third-party clients for the server where 99% of Signal users are on, and without that, group chats aren’t useful.
  - StudentStuff 9y ago
    Since when? You by default use the main servers when you install Noise or signal-cli, despite how Moxie may dislike this fracturing of the Signal client ecosystem.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Moxie still disallows their use of his servers, they just disregard his demands.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  And yet even the best of the best cryptographic protocols provide little to no value on very insecure systems like iphone and android. It's like bike shedding of security, where Moxi focuses on the things he can do but for the systems where it doesn't matter.
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    I find it odd that someone would say an iPhone is “very insecure” after the USG, of all players, very publicly couldn’t get into a model from right before the security design hardened, not to mention the also very public panic in the IC about losing access to intelligence due to mobile phone developments. That’s a strange position to tout with the underlying implication that PC platforms are better. Are you broadening “insecure” to mean “centralized, opinionated security architecture designed for tech-illiterate masses that I don’t like?” Because that isn’t what it means.
    - philipov 9y ago
      I thought that ended with the government getting into the phone using an exploit, just without forcing Apple's cooperation.
      - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
        Hence the hardened part. That exploit doesn’t work against any later model, and they spent a lot of money to get into that particular phone. Even with that observation, how can one claim “very insecure?” Do you think it’s that difficult to compromise a PC with physical access? What does secure even mean to people any more? I trust my phone a hell of a lot more than any general purpose computing platform, and I’d say the same if I owned any number of a significant collection of Android devices. This isn’t phone vs. phone advocacy, just annoyance at opinions that people disingenuously consider factual, useful observations on security.
      - theptip 9y ago
        Only after they paid an Israeli security company for a 0-day vulnerability, which allegedly cost north of $1m. Interested to know how that amount compares to other OSes, I really don't know what the going rate is on Windows/Linux.
- wyager 9y ago
  Unfortunately, it looks like the signal people are possibly not friendly to third-party devs and have levied seemingly spurious IP threats against third-party implementations: https://medium.com/@wireapp/axolotl-and-proteus-788519b186a7 https://medium.com/@wireapp/axolotl-and-proteus-788519b186a7 Obviously this is just one side of the story, but it sounds rather alarming.
  - baby 9y ago
    I believed this was debunked by moxie somewhere on HN
    - ktta 9y ago
      Would you mind linking it? I've tried to see his past comments but couldn't find anything dated after the blog post on a first look. Just a lot of LibreSignal stuff.
      - baby 9y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727870
        matharmin 9y ago
        Extract from that comment: > We haven't patented any of the concepts here, and we've done a lot to explain and popularize them. We're happy for people to use these concepts to build their own implementations of similar protocols, but we don't want people slapping things together and calling that Signal Protocol. That doesn't debunk anything in the blog post - it reinforces the point that moxie doesn't want any third-party implementations of the protocol.
        cwyers 9y ago
        It sounds like they'll defend the Signal trademark, but not the implementation concepts. I don't see how that's bad.
sneak 9y ago
Users don’t want federation. See also: Adoption failure of Google Talk XMPP, massive adoption of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, and AIM before it. I wish it were different, too.
- cornholio 9y ago
  Users "want" what everybody else is using so they can communicate. If everybody is using a federated protocol, like email, that's what they will want. You might say it is fundamentally easier to build closed systems and entice users to adopt them, but that's a business aspect not a user preference. Exactly the type of business that's of interest to regulators.
- jkarneges 9y ago
  I think users would prefer federated systems. Who wouldn't? Even though most people have probably never heard the word before, they almost certainly use and appreciate federated systems like phones and email. Do people want federation enough to have to take a principled stance in order to force change? Heck no. And that's the problem: there's no reasonable way for their desire to impact the producer side of the market. Can't vote with your wallet since public IM service is universally free, plus network effects are strong. Users are being worn down, too. I remember when Pidgin, Adium, Trillian, etc were rather popular. Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. This is a crazy mess we got ourselves in, and there is no easy fix. Time machine to 1980 to get a standard out before ICQ, maybe.
  - chme 9y ago
    > Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. IMO that is really one personal hell for me. I blame android and apple for this. I was happy with my N900 where you got one chat application that supported SMS, Skype, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, whatever. The world was so simple back then. Now everything has to be a separate "app", where previous there where just plugins. Such a decline in usability.
chme 9y ago
> I hope they eventually develop a federated, privacy oriented messaging protocol, once the rapid technological evolution settles down. Like matrix[1]? That uses signals encryption. [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/
- mashedvikings 9y ago
  You mean, Matrix does not pose arbitrary limitations to clients that want to use end-to-end encryption. Clients that do not yet feature it by default, and that give huge warnings when you try to enable it. Clients that have problems with complex navigation when trying to verify fingerprints. Matrix is not the future, because at some point you're going to need to defeat metadata, and decentralized platforms can't do that. The future is in apps like Ricochet and Briar.
  - Arathorn 9y ago
    To be fair; Matrix's crypto is fairly solid. The key management however is a mess, and we have run late on fixing it - but we're working on it currently. The metadata concern is bogus however: we designed Matrix to evolve into a hybrid p2p/decentralised architecture in future without changing a line of clientside code, so folks who want to store their metadata on their client rather than their server can do so - https://matrix.org/~matthew/2016-12-22%20Matrix%20Balancing%20Interop%20and%20Privacy.pdf https://matrix.org/~matthew/2016-12-22%20Matrix%20Balancing%... has some notes on that. In practice, we think neither pure federation (like XMPP) or pure p2p (like Riocochet) or pure centralisation (like Signal) is desirable - you want to have a hybrid of decentralisation & p2p so you can get the best of both worlds.
    - mashedvikings 9y ago
      What are the benefits of decentralized servers over p2p? "Metadata concern is bogus" yet the linked documentation explicitly says bridges expose metadata, and that home servers expose metadata. One advantage of Pond-hybrid is "Supports any and all Matrix clients via the existing standard client-server API". This means the issue is desire to remain compatible with insecure clients. This is lack of agility is not needed. I hope you fix things before it's too late and focus on Pond or other Tor hidden service based communication.
aidenn0 9y ago
If federated communcations is a desire, OMEMO[1] is a thing. However, there are issues with federated protocols beyond the velocity issue that Moxie mentions. Some of them are technical and some of them are not (see conversations.im comment on doing xmpp notifications on iOS for example), but they do exist. 1: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html
craftyguy 9y ago
> I hope they eventually develop a federated, privacy oriented messaging protocol, once the rapid technological evolution settles down. Yes. It's hard to get too excited for the 'expansion' of Yet Another Walled Garden. I say this as a long time user of Signal. It's currently the lesser of most evils, but it still has a lot of room for improvement.
bonestamp2 9y ago
> once the rapid technological evolution settles down Why wait?
chithanh 9y ago
> Signal is indeed an open protocol. The Signal protocol is public, but not open. It is a proprietary protocol which is controlled entirely by the company behind Signal.

tptacek 9y ago

Signal Protocol is one of the best documented cryptographic message protocols on the planet, and is accompanied by multiple GPL'd implementations. https://signal.org/docs/ https://signal.org/docs/

baby 9y ago
which sounds like it could be used to develop a federated protocol. I've heard there is an effort to do an RFC on the subject, but I'm not sure it uses the Signal protocols (for some reason), also there are two of them (I'm confused): * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-mls-protocol-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-mls-protocol-00 * https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-mls-architecture-01 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omara-mls-architecture-01
- vader1 9y ago
  Using OMEMO on XMPP is a federated implementation of the Signal protocol. I believe Matrix' e2e encryption is also based on it.
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    I’m really hoping OMEMO makes it into Openfire (XMPP Server) and Adium (XMPP Client) sooner rather than later, we current use OTR but OMEMO is objectively superior in every way I can see.
    - kees99 9y ago
      In general, servers should have nothing to do with end-to-end encryption, except for not actively breaking it. OMEMO in particular uses: - Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP, XEP-0163) to transport key material; and - core RFC3920/RFC6120 XMPP protocol to transport encrypted messages. Both of which are already supported by Openfire [see JM-1122]. So, as far as I can tell, Openfire is fully capable of delivering OMEMO messages right now. https://issues.igniterealtime.org/browse/JM-1122 https://issues.igniterealtime.org/browse/JM-1122 [EDIT] For Adium OMEMO support, have a look at Lurch: https://github.com/shtrom/Lurch4Adium https://github.com/shtrom/Lurch4Adium
    - synchronise 9y ago
      I don't think Adium is doing much in terms of active development sadly.
- dTal 9y ago
  Do you consider SMS a federated protocol? https://silence.im/ https://silence.im/
  - Zash 9y ago
    SMS is federated, users of one providers can send messages to users of a different provider. Same with phone calls. Becoming a telephony provider probably takes a bit more investment than with some random Internet based service.
kuschku 9y ago
And Moxie disallows people from building third-party clients for the server where 99% of Signal users are on, and without that, group chats aren’t useful.
- StudentStuff 9y ago
  Since when? You by default use the main servers when you install Noise or signal-cli, despite how Moxie may dislike this fracturing of the Signal client ecosystem.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Moxie still disallows their use of his servers, they just disregard his demands.
zzzcpan 9y ago
And yet even the best of the best cryptographic protocols provide little to no value on very insecure systems like iphone and android. It's like bike shedding of security, where Moxi focuses on the things he can do but for the systems where it doesn't matter.
- jsmthrowaway 9y ago
  I find it odd that someone would say an iPhone is “very insecure” after the USG, of all players, very publicly couldn’t get into a model from right before the security design hardened, not to mention the also very public panic in the IC about losing access to intelligence due to mobile phone developments. That’s a strange position to tout with the underlying implication that PC platforms are better. Are you broadening “insecure” to mean “centralized, opinionated security architecture designed for tech-illiterate masses that I don’t like?” Because that isn’t what it means.
  - philipov 9y ago
    I thought that ended with the government getting into the phone using an exploit, just without forcing Apple's cooperation.
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      Hence the hardened part. That exploit doesn’t work against any later model, and they spent a lot of money to get into that particular phone. Even with that observation, how can one claim “very insecure?” Do you think it’s that difficult to compromise a PC with physical access? What does secure even mean to people any more? I trust my phone a hell of a lot more than any general purpose computing platform, and I’d say the same if I owned any number of a significant collection of Android devices. This isn’t phone vs. phone advocacy, just annoyance at opinions that people disingenuously consider factual, useful observations on security.
    - theptip 9y ago
      Only after they paid an Israeli security company for a 0-day vulnerability, which allegedly cost north of $1m. Interested to know how that amount compares to other OSes, I really don't know what the going rate is on Windows/Linux.
wyager 9y ago
Unfortunately, it looks like the signal people are possibly not friendly to third-party devs and have levied seemingly spurious IP threats against third-party implementations: https://medium.com/@wireapp/axolotl-and-proteus-788519b186a7 https://medium.com/@wireapp/axolotl-and-proteus-788519b186a7 Obviously this is just one side of the story, but it sounds rather alarming.
- baby 9y ago
  I believed this was debunked by moxie somewhere on HN
  - ktta 9y ago
    Would you mind linking it? I've tried to see his past comments but couldn't find anything dated after the blog post on a first look. Just a lot of LibreSignal stuff.
    - baby 9y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11727870
      - matharmin 9y ago
        Extract from that comment: > We haven't patented any of the concepts here, and we've done a lot to explain and popularize them. We're happy for people to use these concepts to build their own implementations of similar protocols, but we don't want people slapping things together and calling that Signal Protocol. That doesn't debunk anything in the blog post - it reinforces the point that moxie doesn't want any third-party implementations of the protocol.
        cwyers 9y ago
        It sounds like they'll defend the Signal trademark, but not the implementation concepts. I don't see how that's bad.

sneak 9y ago

Users don’t want federation. See also: Adoption failure of Google Talk XMPP, massive adoption of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, and AIM before it. I wish it were different, too.

cornholio 9y ago
Users "want" what everybody else is using so they can communicate. If everybody is using a federated protocol, like email, that's what they will want. You might say it is fundamentally easier to build closed systems and entice users to adopt them, but that's a business aspect not a user preference. Exactly the type of business that's of interest to regulators.
jkarneges 9y ago
I think users would prefer federated systems. Who wouldn't? Even though most people have probably never heard the word before, they almost certainly use and appreciate federated systems like phones and email. Do people want federation enough to have to take a principled stance in order to force change? Heck no. And that's the problem: there's no reasonable way for their desire to impact the producer side of the market. Can't vote with your wallet since public IM service is universally free, plus network effects are strong. Users are being worn down, too. I remember when Pidgin, Adium, Trillian, etc were rather popular. Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. This is a crazy mess we got ourselves in, and there is no easy fix. Time machine to 1980 to get a standard out before ICQ, maybe.
- chme 9y ago
  > Now most people don't even use those kinds of consolidation apps either, and resign themselves to literally running many separate apps. IMO that is really one personal hell for me. I blame android and apple for this. I was happy with my N900 where you got one chat application that supported SMS, Skype, XMPP, AIM, ICQ, whatever. The world was so simple back then. Now everything has to be a separate "app", where previous there where just plugins. Such a decline in usability.

chme 9y ago

> I hope they eventually develop a federated, privacy oriented messaging protocol, once the rapid technological evolution settles down. Like matrix[1]? That uses signals encryption. [1] https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/

mashedvikings 9y ago
You mean, Matrix does not pose arbitrary limitations to clients that want to use end-to-end encryption. Clients that do not yet feature it by default, and that give huge warnings when you try to enable it. Clients that have problems with complex navigation when trying to verify fingerprints. Matrix is not the future, because at some point you're going to need to defeat metadata, and decentralized platforms can't do that. The future is in apps like Ricochet and Briar.
- Arathorn 9y ago
  To be fair; Matrix's crypto is fairly solid. The key management however is a mess, and we have run late on fixing it - but we're working on it currently. The metadata concern is bogus however: we designed Matrix to evolve into a hybrid p2p/decentralised architecture in future without changing a line of clientside code, so folks who want to store their metadata on their client rather than their server can do so - https://matrix.org/~matthew/2016-12-22%20Matrix%20Balancing%20Interop%20and%20Privacy.pdf https://matrix.org/~matthew/2016-12-22%20Matrix%20Balancing%... has some notes on that. In practice, we think neither pure federation (like XMPP) or pure p2p (like Riocochet) or pure centralisation (like Signal) is desirable - you want to have a hybrid of decentralisation & p2p so you can get the best of both worlds.
  - mashedvikings 9y ago
    What are the benefits of decentralized servers over p2p? "Metadata concern is bogus" yet the linked documentation explicitly says bridges expose metadata, and that home servers expose metadata. One advantage of Pond-hybrid is "Supports any and all Matrix clients via the existing standard client-server API". This means the issue is desire to remain compatible with insecure clients. This is lack of agility is not needed. I hope you fix things before it's too late and focus on Pond or other Tor hidden service based communication.

aidenn0 9y ago

If federated communcations is a desire, OMEMO[1] is a thing. However, there are issues with federated protocols beyond the velocity issue that Moxie mentions. Some of them are technical and some of them are not (see conversations.im comment on doing xmpp notifications on iOS for example), but they do exist. 1: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html

craftyguy 9y ago

> I hope they eventually develop a federated, privacy oriented messaging protocol, once the rapid technological evolution settles down. Yes. It's hard to get too excited for the 'expansion' of Yet Another Walled Garden. I say this as a long time user of Signal. It's currently the lesser of most evils, but it still has a lot of room for improvement.

bonestamp2 9y ago

> once the rapid technological evolution settles down Why wait?

chithanh 9y ago

> Signal is indeed an open protocol. The Signal protocol is public, but not open. It is a proprietary protocol which is controlled entirely by the company behind Signal.