5 ms·

Here's a hard problem that I would like the world's highest paid people to solve: Give us an app where everything, including metadata, is end-to-end encrypted

by yedava 3y ago

Here's a hard problem that I would like the world's highest paid people to solve: Give us an app where everything, including metadata, is end-to-end encrypted and works at "web scale". No one other than the people in the conversation can know who is talking to who and when. Then figure out a way to pay the bills to run the infrastructure and pay the people working on the app and also make a profit. (A novel idea: Maybe charge people to use the app?)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
darig 3y ago
[dead]
freedomben 3y ago
The everything encrypted is a hard one, but should be doable so long as the incentives are right. For example, the money needs to be paid by the users for the product, and to keep it fully encrypted. It needs to be clear that not only is there no incentive to sell data or mine for ads, but doing so is a disincentive because it would actually lead to customer loss. If I could raise enough money to replace my dayjob, I would totally do this. I'm guessing it's not doable, but I put together a quick Google Form to gauge interest. If anyone would be interested, please submit the form[1] [1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1sl5MI1Mxna6RBTXB4mqxAVo5TvF38zz4Hp7K9aKEVHfZDw/viewform?usp=sf_link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1sl5MI1Mxna6RBTXB...
phocion 3y ago
Doesn't Signal do all of this, minus the profit? > Maybe charge people to use the app? Who will pay for a service that's offered for free by at least 3 major messaging apps?
- esafak 3y ago
  I pay for Signal. I used to pay for WhatsApp, before it was acquired. Not many users are like me, granted.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  I'm not aware how to anonymously use Signal in any meaningful way but there might be some way.
  - contact9879 3y ago
    Anonymity isn't necessary. e.g. Briar isn't anonymous (you still need to trust your contacts), but it's essentially impossible for third-parties to track who is talking to who and when.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Use it via a VPN and with a telephone number that is not associated with your identity. This is what I do.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      That's pseudonymity, not anonymity. Signal doesn't allow creating multiple identities for different contexts (without using multiple phones). And depending on your personal risk profile (e.g. journalists protecting their sources), phone numbers are extremely difficult to acquire anonymously in many countries. In most EU countries, you need to show photo ID to register prepaid SIM cards these days.
      - sneak 3y ago
        You don’t need to acquire a phone number from the country you’re in. Any phone number works on Signal. There’s no long distance. In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number via the internet that works fine on Signal. There is no requirement that the SIM card in your phone be the number you use to register on Signal, or that the number even be a GSM number. My Signal number is a Google Voice number, for example. Anyone with access to a US GSM number can create these; many are for sale for anonymous payment methods. It’s easy to use Signal anonymously in any country that has mostly uncensored internet.
        lxgr 3y ago
michaelsbradley 3y ago
It may not check all of your boxes, but the waku protocol and applications’ use of it have been evolving since 2018: https://waku.org/ https://waku.org/ https://github.com/waku-org/nwaku https://github.com/waku-org/nwaku
nirav72 3y ago
Even harder problem is getting the average user to care about things like end-to-end encryption. Let alone getting them to pay for it. Thats why services like Signal are not in the majority.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- poisonborz 3y ago
  Give it a decade or two. The increasing amount of things we store digitally and the risk of exposure or losing them rises day by day, with it the amount of people who were credit scammed, crypto stolen, bully sharing explicit images etc, not speaking of scandals like Meta had. Not long ago people didn't care about their home being energy efficient either.
blackoil 3y ago
Who wants this? All the effort and few thousand users paying 20 USD / year doesn't make much profit. The world is happy with the encryption WhatsApp provides and would have been happy even if that wasn't there.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Also iMessages. 135M users in the US.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    It also isn't really encrypted. The really juicy bits (metadata) is available for Apple to read as it sees fit.
beefsack 3y ago
It seems really straightforward to suggest that the better way to solve this is with standard protocols and self-hosting, but I do realise that's quite hand wavy and often not very accessible. SMTP is an example of this succeeding, as problematic as that protocol is.
temporalparts 3y ago
It's not possible to have a "web scale" that end-to-end encrypts metadata, because part of the metadata is understanding the recipient. If the network or server has no idea where to deliver an encrypted message, then the only way to guarantee delivery is to send all the messages to all the users to unpack to see which ones are relevant to them, which fails "web scale"
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  What if all inboxes were public, but only decryptable by the recipient? Recipient can then poll for new messages.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    Only the recipient would be able receive/send messages from that inbox. So you can easily match inbox to the recipient.
    - eru 3y ago
      You wouldn't send via your inbox. And anyone would be able to download any inbox, the data would just be useless without the key. There might be problems with the proposed model, but they aren't the problems you suggested. (As an individual, you wouldn't want to download just your own inbox. But to obfuscate, you can download a random subset of inboxes that often-enough includes your own.)
      - ThatPlayer 3y ago
        And that's not something I want to have to do: download random inboxes on a limited phone data plan. As a polled service, how many times do you have a poll a minute? If I'm instant messaging, I could be pulling multiple times a seconds. How many more inboxes would I have to poll at the same time to obfuscate my actual inbox? And if you want to be anonymous you can't filter by the last message you've received, so every time you pull your inbox, you're getting the last X time in messages. So if I have multiple active group chats, that would really start to add up. Videos and images like every other messaging service would have to be anonymized the same way. Even 10x noise polling for a 10MB video would be too much data on phones and probably not enough to anonymous. How about obfuscating the sender? Would a sender be uploading 10x trash, not just text but also video, messages in every inbox?
bee_rider 3y ago
A non-free messenger app seems pretty challenging because * there’s lots of free competition, including Signal, which is free and decent. * you’d probably need to open source it if you want to convince anyone it was trustworthy * what if you want to message somebody that doesn’t want to pay? Of course maybe a huge company could work this out… but it seems fundamentally very hard
contact9879 3y ago
Briar gets most of the way. And Cwtch gets all the way (except maybe the pay the people working on it). Any sort of project that actively tries to minimize data collection will not be profitable. At least not in this current economic system. They will have to be non-profit (Signal, etc), or run by volunteers (Cwtch, Briar).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
miloignis 3y ago
I'd love something like the Matrix [0] data model (JSON messages aggregated in an eventually-consistent chatroom CRDT) transmitted over something like simplex for metadata resistance. [0] https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [1] https://simplex.chat/ https://simplex.chat/
ThatPlayer 3y ago
The #1 thing that sounds impossible is how do tie a payment to an account anonymously? Unless you only take anonymous payments, you end up putting a credit card number on every account. >No one other than the people in the conversation can know who is talking to who and when. This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages.
- eru 3y ago
  > This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages. Not necessarily. Eg as a simple model, assume that you 'send' a message by publishing it to something like a usenet group (and perhaps that group charges you a fraction of a cent for doing so). There's no denial-of-service for a client that receives a lot of messages, distributed or otherwise, but still outsider don't see who is sending what to whom.
aspenmayer 3y ago
> Veilid is a peer-to-peer network and application framework released by the Cult of the Dead Cow on August 11, 2023, at DEF CON 31. Described by its authors as "like Tor, but for apps", it is written in Rust, and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and in-browser WASM. VeilidChat is a secure messaging application built on Veilid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid > Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-ﬁrst, networked application framework. > The framework is conceptually similar to IPFS and Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services over a privately routed network. > The framework enables development of fully-distributed applications without a 'blockchain' or a 'transactional layer' at their base. > The framework can be included as part of user-facing applications or run as a 'headless node' for power users who wish to help build the network. https://veilid.com/ https://veilid.com/ https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid https://veilid.com/discord https://veilid.com/discord https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ > VeilidChat is a chat application written for the Veilid distributed application platform. It has a familiar and simple interface and is designed for private, and secure person-to-person communications. https://veilid.com/chat/ https://veilid.com/chat/ https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat Previously: Veilid is an open-source, P2P, mobile-ﬁrst, networked application framework 180 points 4 months ago 71 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124 Cult of the Dead Cow wants to save internet privacy with new encryption protocol 141 points 4 months ago 79 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018404 https://gizmodo.com/cult-of-the-dead-cow-launches-veilid-encryption-project-1850699803 https://gizmodo.com/cult-of-the-dead-cow-launches-veilid-enc...
greentea23 3y ago
Two projects that are trying: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android
upofadown 3y ago
This is doable and has been done. Briar is an example. The Tor network is used for transport and there is no central server. Even the clients don't know who is talking to who, everything is done in terms of the crytographic identity number. That means that even the users don't for sure know who they are talking to; as part of the introduction to someone you have to give the name you will know them by. The Briar way of doing things actually solves an important E2EE usability issue. Since the cryptographic identity is the only identity, it is much harder for the user to end up using the system without a verified identity.

by yedava 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

darig 3y ago

[dead]

freedomben 3y ago

The everything encrypted is a hard one, but should be doable so long as the incentives are right. For example, the money needs to be paid by the users for the product, and to keep it fully encrypted. It needs to be clear that not only is there no incentive to sell data or mine for ads, but doing so is a disincentive because it would actually lead to customer loss. If I could raise enough money to replace my dayjob, I would totally do this. I'm guessing it's not doable, but I put together a quick Google Form to gauge interest. If anyone would be interested, please submit the form[1] [1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1sl5MI1Mxna6RBTXB4mqxAVo5TvF38zz4Hp7K9aKEVHfZDw/viewform?usp=sf_link https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1sl5MI1Mxna6RBTXB...

phocion 3y ago

Doesn't Signal do all of this, minus the profit? > Maybe charge people to use the app? Who will pay for a service that's offered for free by at least 3 major messaging apps?

esafak 3y ago
I pay for Signal. I used to pay for WhatsApp, before it was acquired. Not many users are like me, granted.
jszymborski 3y ago
I'm not aware how to anonymously use Signal in any meaningful way but there might be some way.
- contact9879 3y ago
  Anonymity isn't necessary. e.g. Briar isn't anonymous (you still need to trust your contacts), but it's essentially impossible for third-parties to track who is talking to who and when.
- sneak 3y ago
  Use it via a VPN and with a telephone number that is not associated with your identity. This is what I do.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    That's pseudonymity, not anonymity. Signal doesn't allow creating multiple identities for different contexts (without using multiple phones). And depending on your personal risk profile (e.g. journalists protecting their sources), phone numbers are extremely difficult to acquire anonymously in many countries. In most EU countries, you need to show photo ID to register prepaid SIM cards these days.
    - sneak 3y ago
      You don’t need to acquire a phone number from the country you’re in. Any phone number works on Signal. There’s no long distance. In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number via the internet that works fine on Signal. There is no requirement that the SIM card in your phone be the number you use to register on Signal, or that the number even be a GSM number. My Signal number is a Google Voice number, for example. Anyone with access to a US GSM number can create these; many are for sale for anonymous payment methods. It’s easy to use Signal anonymously in any country that has mostly uncensored internet.
      - lxgr 3y ago

michaelsbradley 3y ago

It may not check all of your boxes, but the waku protocol and applications’ use of it have been evolving since 2018: https://waku.org/ https://waku.org/ https://github.com/waku-org/nwaku https://github.com/waku-org/nwaku

nirav72 3y ago

Even harder problem is getting the average user to care about things like end-to-end encryption. Let alone getting them to pay for it. Thats why services like Signal are not in the majority.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
poisonborz 3y ago
Give it a decade or two. The increasing amount of things we store digitally and the risk of exposure or losing them rises day by day, with it the amount of people who were credit scammed, crypto stolen, bully sharing explicit images etc, not speaking of scandals like Meta had. Not long ago people didn't care about their home being energy efficient either.

blackoil 3y ago

Who wants this? All the effort and few thousand users paying 20 USD / year doesn't make much profit. The world is happy with the encryption WhatsApp provides and would have been happy even if that wasn't there.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Also iMessages. 135M users in the US.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  It also isn't really encrypted. The really juicy bits (metadata) is available for Apple to read as it sees fit.

beefsack 3y ago

It seems really straightforward to suggest that the better way to solve this is with standard protocols and self-hosting, but I do realise that's quite hand wavy and often not very accessible. SMTP is an example of this succeeding, as problematic as that protocol is.

temporalparts 3y ago

It's not possible to have a "web scale" that end-to-end encrypts metadata, because part of the metadata is understanding the recipient. If the network or server has no idea where to deliver an encrypted message, then the only way to guarantee delivery is to send all the messages to all the users to unpack to see which ones are relevant to them, which fails "web scale"

hamandcheese 3y ago
What if all inboxes were public, but only decryptable by the recipient? Recipient can then poll for new messages.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Only the recipient would be able receive/send messages from that inbox. So you can easily match inbox to the recipient.
  - eru 3y ago
    You wouldn't send via your inbox. And anyone would be able to download any inbox, the data would just be useless without the key. There might be problems with the proposed model, but they aren't the problems you suggested. (As an individual, you wouldn't want to download just your own inbox. But to obfuscate, you can download a random subset of inboxes that often-enough includes your own.)
    - ThatPlayer 3y ago
      And that's not something I want to have to do: download random inboxes on a limited phone data plan. As a polled service, how many times do you have a poll a minute? If I'm instant messaging, I could be pulling multiple times a seconds. How many more inboxes would I have to poll at the same time to obfuscate my actual inbox? And if you want to be anonymous you can't filter by the last message you've received, so every time you pull your inbox, you're getting the last X time in messages. So if I have multiple active group chats, that would really start to add up. Videos and images like every other messaging service would have to be anonymized the same way. Even 10x noise polling for a 10MB video would be too much data on phones and probably not enough to anonymous. How about obfuscating the sender? Would a sender be uploading 10x trash, not just text but also video, messages in every inbox?

bee_rider 3y ago

A non-free messenger app seems pretty challenging because * there’s lots of free competition, including Signal, which is free and decent. * you’d probably need to open source it if you want to convince anyone it was trustworthy * what if you want to message somebody that doesn’t want to pay? Of course maybe a huge company could work this out… but it seems fundamentally very hard

contact9879 3y ago

Briar gets most of the way. And Cwtch gets all the way (except maybe the pay the people working on it). Any sort of project that actively tries to minimize data collection will not be profitable. At least not in this current economic system. They will have to be non-profit (Signal, etc), or run by volunteers (Cwtch, Briar).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

miloignis 3y ago

I'd love something like the Matrix [0] data model (JSON messages aggregated in an eventually-consistent chatroom CRDT) transmitted over something like simplex for metadata resistance. [0] https://matrix.org https://matrix.org [1] https://simplex.chat/ https://simplex.chat/

ThatPlayer 3y ago

The #1 thing that sounds impossible is how do tie a payment to an account anonymously? Unless you only take anonymous payments, you end up putting a credit card number on every account. >No one other than the people in the conversation can know who is talking to who and when. This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages.

eru 3y ago
> This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages. Not necessarily. Eg as a simple model, assume that you 'send' a message by publishing it to something like a usenet group (and perhaps that group charges you a fraction of a cent for doing so). There's no denial-of-service for a client that receives a lot of messages, distributed or otherwise, but still outsider don't see who is sending what to whom.

aspenmayer 3y ago

> Veilid is a peer-to-peer network and application framework released by the Cult of the Dead Cow on August 11, 2023, at DEF CON 31. Described by its authors as "like Tor, but for apps", it is written in Rust, and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and in-browser WASM. VeilidChat is a secure messaging application built on Veilid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid > Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-ﬁrst, networked application framework. > The framework is conceptually similar to IPFS and Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services over a privately routed network. > The framework enables development of fully-distributed applications without a 'blockchain' or a 'transactional layer' at their base. > The framework can be included as part of user-facing applications or run as a 'headless node' for power users who wish to help build the network. https://veilid.com/ https://veilid.com/ https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid https://veilid.com/discord https://veilid.com/discord https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ > VeilidChat is a chat application written for the Veilid distributed application platform. It has a familiar and simple interface and is designed for private, and secure person-to-person communications. https://veilid.com/chat/ https://veilid.com/chat/ https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat Previously: Veilid is an open-source, P2P, mobile-ﬁrst, networked application framework 180 points 4 months ago 71 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124 Cult of the Dead Cow wants to save internet privacy with new encryption protocol 141 points 4 months ago 79 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018404 https://gizmodo.com/cult-of-the-dead-cow-launches-veilid-encryption-project-1850699803 https://gizmodo.com/cult-of-the-dead-cow-launches-veilid-enc...

greentea23 3y ago

Two projects that are trying: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android

upofadown 3y ago

This is doable and has been done. Briar is an example. The Tor network is used for transport and there is no central server. Even the clients don't know who is talking to who, everything is done in terms of the crytographic identity number. That means that even the users don't for sure know who they are talking to; as part of the introduction to someone you have to give the name you will know them by. The Briar way of doing things actually solves an important E2EE usability issue. Since the cryptographic identity is the only identity, it is much harder for the user to end up using the system without a verified identity.