4 ms·

Agreed. The content of the chat's would be potentially much more important in my mind.

• hazelnut 12y ago
  Which leads to the question if slack encrypts the chat data in the database.
  • mateuszf 12y ago
    That would make implementing search quite hard so I'd say - it's pretty likely they don't encrypt it.
    • smt88 12y ago
      If anyone from Slack is reading this, the encryption should be an option, even if it means disabling or substantially slowing the search feature.
      • NeutronBoy 12y ago
        If they encrypted it, Slack would have to hold the key, so that all users in an org can then read existing messages.
        • smt88 12y ago
          No, it could be a private key shared among users.
    • newobj 12y ago
      That's not right. There is no need to store text body in order to index it. Furthermore, you can implement an index of token hashes, rather than an index of tokens.
      • polyfractal 12y ago
        It would remove a lot of nice search features, however. If you just index tokens without positional information, you have a much harder time performing phrase matching. If you include positional information, you can probably crack the encryption because some tokens are statistically more likely to appear next to each other than others. If you index shingles (phrase chunks) instead, you lose out on sloppy phrases...you can only match exact phrases. I imagine you can perform a similar statistical attack too. Hell, just getting the term dictionary would probably allow you to reverse engineer the tokens, since written language follows a very predictable power law. Hashing also removes the ability to highlight search results, which significantly degrades search functionality for an end user. Basically, yes, you can do search with encrypted tokens...but it will be a very poor search experience.
    • skatenerd 12y ago
      This reminds me of the plot of Silicon Valley
    • sukilot 12y ago
      If they dont encrypt storage they are highly negligent. Index and search are done in RAM,which is slightly harder to steal than disk data.
  • jacquesm 12y ago
    Is there a good reason to keep chat data longer than it takes to deliver it to the recipient?
    • buttsex 12y ago
      They archive chat messages so that you can search through them later.
      • jacquesm 12y ago
        That alone would be a great reason not to use them.
        • LaurentVB 12y ago
          It's also a great reason to use them, isn't it? Your searchable chat history basically becomes the knowledge base of your company.
          • gaadd33 12y ago
            And a great target for discovery in any sort of lawsuit.
            • brandon272 12y ago
              As is email.
          • ncza 12y ago
            To me, that is something that you should keep internal, on internal systems with vetted free software.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
        • brackin 12y ago
          It's why I love Slack. If I remember a conversation about something two months ago I go to the room, search and find exactly what I needed.
• higherpurpose 12y ago
  Maybe it's time for Slack to adopt the Axolotl ratchet, too.
  • smerritt 12y ago
    I'd love for them to do that, but there's a couple of problems that they'd have to overcome first. First: Slackbot. This is a Slack-run bot that's in every channel; team owners can customize it to do various things, like scan messages for keywords and give out canned responses. Even if Slack adopted some variant of encrypted chat, each message would still need to be readable by Slackbot, so Slack would still have the means to collect every message. Second: channel history. When I join a channel, I can see the messages in that channel from before I joined. This means that Slack (the server) must be able to give me those historical messages. In an encrypted group chat, the messages are encrypted only with the keys of the participants at that time, which means newcomers can't read them. I'm sure there are other features in conflict with end-to-end encryption, too; these are just off the top of my head.
    • icebraining 12y ago
      The first could be solved by having the activation part of the bot run on the clients themselves, and only send those messages in a readable way to the server. As for the second, the server could ask one of the clients to re-encrypt the channel history with the newcomer's key. It would only fail if nobody was online the moment you joined the channel (and you still could get it later).