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purplebeetroot
you know of this WG right? https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/mls/about/ It's about creating a standart for message encryption in groups their MUC: xmpp:mls@jabber.ietf.org?join
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L29Ah
another one?
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L29Ah
nice thing about standards
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purplebeetroot
they hope to reach interoperability.
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L29Ah
like OTR?
- L29Ah was surprised when he learned that OTRv4 didn't include multi-user chats
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dequbed
L29Ah: MLS is designed to be agnostic over the chat protocols in use and instead defines terminology and features in a high-level way.
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L29Ah
so like OTR
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dequbed
I guess? I haven't looked much at OTR
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dequbed
But MLS is specifically designed for reasonable big group chats in the style of Matrix' megOlm. And at least the OTR that I used didn't really do that whole more than two party all that well :)
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dequbed
The worst outcome anyway is that it ends up like SASL where everybody implements it by hand anyway and then only does the subset of features they specifically want meaning stuff isn't interoperable again. The best outcome is it ends up like TLS where just about everything that's vaguely stream-orientated can now be transport encrypted with very little efford on the developers part and as a result almost all chat is now fully e2ee.✎ -
dequbed
The worst outcome anyway is that it ends up like SASL where everybody implements it by hand anyway and then only does the subset of features they specifically want meaning stuff isn't interoperable again. The best outcome is it ends up like TLS where just about everything that's vaguely stream-orientated can now be transport encrypted with very little efford on the developers part and as a result of MLS being that way almost all chat is now fully e2ee. ✏
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vanitasvitae
Originally the MLS folks planned to design MLS such that it would work cross-protocol, but I believe thats no longer a high-priority goal for them
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vanitasvitae
Cross-protocol support would have been awesome though
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vanitasvitae
Imagine e2ee cross bridges
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dequbed
Well its still possible if I haven't misread the spec. The bridge has to translate a few things between hither and yonder but it doesn't have to MITM the encryption
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vanitasvitae
Well, there is no common message format (apart from some old rusty thing called XMPP)