3 ms·

Since you’ve been in the field, and have thought about it a lot more than me: isn’t privacy inversely proportional to the size of group who’s in on the secret?

Since you’ve been in the field, and have thought about it a lot more than me: isn’t privacy inversely proportional to the size of group who’s in on the secret? And that’s not even a technology issue. And therefore demanding E2EE for groupware might seem almost nonsensical, since wide proliferation of access keys makes the whole secret room subject to increasing likelihood of accidental or malicious compromise - ending up more privacy theatre than actual privacy? e.g. if there are 1000 different individual keys to access a conversation, how private is that conversation really?

stavros 4y ago
That makes sense in people terms, but in cryptography terms you treat some people as trusted, and some as untrusted. The goal of E2EE is to keep the two groups entirely separate. However, this does make sense when you consider your attack model. When thousands of people know a secret, maybe forward secrecy isn't worth the trouble, and you can simply have one master key that people share between them (to prevent the server from reading any of the communications). There are tons of issues even then, though. For example, you can't send an email notification to someone and show them the content of the message that mentions them (because you don't know it), plus how do you even know they were mentioned? There are probably hundreds of small issues like that, and the fact that the server knows nothing leads you to push most of the functionality to the clients themselves, which leads to more problems.
- skjoldr 4y ago
  If I want my messages to stay away from the public Internet, why would I even want to receive message content over unencrypted email? That makes no sense. Receiving notifications while I am not even logged in also makes little sense because I obviously did not consent to them. And having optional E2EE lets you choose which kinds of messages you don't mind leaking.

stavros 4y ago

That makes sense in people terms, but in cryptography terms you treat some people as trusted, and some as untrusted. The goal of E2EE is to keep the two groups entirely separate. However, this does make sense when you consider your attack model. When thousands of people know a secret, maybe forward secrecy isn't worth the trouble, and you can simply have one master key that people share between them (to prevent the server from reading any of the communications). There are tons of issues even then, though. For example, you can't send an email notification to someone and show them the content of the message that mentions them (because you don't know it), plus how do you even know they were mentioned? There are probably hundreds of small issues like that, and the fact that the server knows nothing leads you to push most of the functionality to the clients themselves, which leads to more problems.

skjoldr 4y ago
If I want my messages to stay away from the public Internet, why would I even want to receive message content over unencrypted email? That makes no sense. Receiving notifications while I am not even logged in also makes little sense because I obviously did not consent to them. And having optional E2EE lets you choose which kinds of messages you don't mind leaking.