3 ms·
> Enabling group administration was also a hard feat, as Signal has to give administrators the ability to add and remove members without its servers knowing who
by infinity0 7y ago
> Enabling group administration was also a hard feat, as Signal has to give administrators the ability to add and remove members without its servers knowing who's part of the conversation.
I was chatting with Trevor Perrin about abstract crypto relating to this when he was presumably working on this, and never got the chance to ask him - even if the group crypto hides this information, the Signal server still has to physically deliver the messages to the correct people in the group, whose phone numbers are all known by the server, so isn't this exercise a bit pointless? Or are there long-term plans to drop the critical reliance on phone numbers?
- maqp 7y ago"Or are there long-term plans to drop the critical reliance on phone numbers?" Yes https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usernames/9157 https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usern...
- infinity0 7y agoThat's a good start. I forgot to add though, to actually make group membership private for real-world practical purposes, you have to achieve all of the following: 1. group crypto can't give away the identities 2. your identity system can't give away the actual people 3. your distribution system can't give away the locations of those people It's a hard problem, nobody in the world has done it yet. Signal seem now to have some concrete thing for (1), by your link they are supposedly working on (2), but (3) is also needed.