End to End Encryption SIG - 2021-09-20

  1. 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

  2. L29Ah

    another one?

  3. L29Ah

    nice thing about standards

  4. purplebeetroot

    they hope to reach interoperability.

  5. L29Ah

    like OTR?

  6. L29Ah was surprised when he learned that OTRv4 didn't include multi-user chats

  7. 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.

  8. L29Ah

    so like OTR

  9. dequbed

    I guess? I haven't looked much at OTR

  10. 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 :)

  11. 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. ✎

  12. 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. ✏

  13. 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

  14. vanitasvitae

    Cross-protocol support would have been awesome though

  15. vanitasvitae

    Imagine e2ee cross bridges

  16. 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

  17. vanitasvitae

    Well, there is no common message format (apart from some old rusty thing called XMPP)