this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
1481 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

60078 readers
3308 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
1481
The creator of Pixelfed announced an upcoming encrypted messenger for the fediverse that will work across the fediverse (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by nix@merv.news to c/technology@lemmy.world
157 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It will be open source, end to end encrypted using Signal’s double ratchet encryption protocol, and he plans to make it easy for fediverse platforms to integrate it. The beta will release later this month.

He’s also the creator of https://fedidb.org btw

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PineapplePartisan@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not leaving Signal until someone implements keeping data at rest encrypted on both ends and requires multi factor unlock (bio+pin is my choice).

So sick of E2E clients that leave the data in plaintext on the devices and then back it up in plaintext to the cloud.

[–] outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Does Signal back up in plaintext in the cloud? (If so that doesn't sound like E2E encryption… unless the 'ends' are uh… also constituted as the cloud itself which is… defeating the purpose).

Where do the pub/ private keys live, exactly, tbh. (Assuming it is asymmetric encryption that they use?)

Edit: ah, misread. I thought you said that you were not joining it due to it storing plain text in the cloud.

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Signal doesn't store any of your chats at all. They're all on-device by design

[–] XaeroDegreaz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Hm... If they're not being stored on the cloud, that means offline users would never receive messages, unless Signal is purely P2P. I haven't looked at the project, or the source, but I find it hard to believe -- you can't really do user lookups without some sort of middleware in the cloud.

[–] KLISHDFSDF@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're right, Signal is not P2P. The way Signals messaging pipeline works is like this - note I'm oversimplifying it for accessibility.

Sending a message to Bob

  1. You press Send.
  2. The message is encrypted on your device with a key that can only be unlocked by Bob.
  3. The message is then "sealed" so that there's only a "deliver to" field visible (not a "from").
  4. The "deliver to" field is addressed with a hashed/salted label for Bob - this means Signal's server can see its a unique user, but not what their name is.
  5. The message is finally sent to Signal's servers.
  6. Your message sits on Signals servers until it can be delivered to the intended recipient.

you can’t really do user lookups without some sort of middleware in the cloud.

See their blog post about Private Contact Discovery, they've spent a long time figuring out how to engineer a method to know as little as possible about you.

[–] InfiniteStruggle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the explanation.

[–] dinckelman@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

All the data they have on any specific user is the account creation date, and the last online timestamp. They've already done loops around this topic in the DOJ.

And I thought it should be obvious that an online service doesn't work if you're offline

[–] XaeroDegreaz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, but messengers, such as WhatsApp for instance, will send you missed messages once you're back online. That's what I was referring to.

[–] PM_ME_UR_PCAPS@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

No, signal does not do cloud backups. The keys live on the end users devices.