You know instance admins can read your direct messages in the fediverse? Twitter and Facebook also can - and sometimes do - read your private messages, and they have infrastructure to comply with law enforcement requests. I'd love to see some end-to-end encryption built into Mastodon clients.
@micahflee This is part of Gmail's Business Model. They make money from reading your emails.
@micahflee is too soon, I think it will happens
@micahflee The Intercept should set up it's own instance, with privacy in mind
@micahflee Hear, hear.
@micahflee e2ee would be great.
@micahflee PGP would be easy but terrible, it would be cool to implement OMEMO
@micahflee Another reason why the "Pick a server that you trust!" blurb on Mastodon's front page makes me skittish.
For me at least, there aren't any!
@auerbach @micahflee You could run your own instance. But all in all Mastodon doesn't seem to be well-suited for private communication, that's not the niche it fills. There are plenty of other projects for that.
@micahflee Yes yes yes.
@micahflee that would require some artful key management. keybase are in a stronger position to deliver that.
@micahflee At least in FidoNet, people understood that.
@micahflee How would you envision it happening? An embedded XMPP client + OTR?
@katjapurrs you wouldn't need XMPP because we already have the OStatus network. I think something like OMEMO, which is a newer fancier protocol than OTR, which supports multiple devices and multiparty chats, would be better. But apparently @Rushyo is already working on something! #e2e
@micahflee @Rushyo Cool, thanks for expanding my knowledge :)
@micahflee Probably https://webpg.org/ could be a good start.
@mmn I think it would be completely reasonable to only have e2e supported by native apps- mobile apps, and perhaps an electron desktop app
@mmn @micahflee technically doable with a browser extension as well?
@mmn it is more enticing to me because Firefox extensions are portable, easier to install and don't require admin privileges
@hisham_hm we just had an "Add-on Hack Day" here in Niterรณi, RJ, Brazil focused on building #crossbrowser #webextensions.
It would be quite easy to ship a #mastodon #webextension that works on #Chrome, #Firefox, #Opera and maybe even #Edge. Maybe I will work on it :fox:
About our Hack Day: http://andregarzia.com/en/blog/addons-hack-day
@soapdog That's a great idea!
Also, very cool post on the hack day!
@micahflee Is it anything you could help with on github?
#MastoDev
@micahflee I feel like PGP was made to solve exactly this kind of problem. Would we even need to change anything, except maybe relaxing the 500-character limit?
@Falkreon the hard problems would be key management, key verification, and multi-device support I think
@micahflee I guess. I feel like associating pubkeys with accounts really needs to be addressed in the scope of OAuth though. Sort of tangential to mastodon.
@Falkreon it's not an easy problem to solve -- no one has solved it really well yet anywhere else either.
If it's addressed through OAuth, then do you trust your OAuth service to act as a CA and to not facilitate MITM attacks? Do you try to build in a web of trust like with PGP? Or do you do TOFU with fingerprint verification like Signal (I think this is the best option)?
@lambadalambda @micahflee the solution here is not to use a different tool, but to fix the tool we're using. There is no reason why #Mastodon couldn't support #e2e #encryption in private messages.
It's neat to encrypt a tweet and send it to someone, but it just seems like the wrong tool for the job.
@lambadalambda @micahflee but that's the tool people are using. I use XMPP+OTR, e-mail+PGP, Signal, etc., but if somebody is not as tech-savvy but is already here, I don't see why they should not have the option of encrypting private messages.
Or, put a bit differently: https://mastodon.social/media/N9MHhHNBYckrKdO8bPc
@lambadalambda @micahflee Yes, that is a concern. Still better than nothing though.
Also, you're completely ignoring apps. If #Mastodon has official and standardized support for #e2e #encryption, apps can implement it, closing the JS loophole.
@pettter @rysiek @micahflee FWIW, I agree with @lambadalambda - it can be argued that private messages are simply a misfeature in OStatus since they cannot be truly private without extra (non-standard) hacks.
Keeping things simple is valuable; using the right tool for the job (some other protocol for private messages) is good engineering.
@HerraBRE @lambadalambda @micahflee @rysiek @pettter "is good engineering" is not the same as "is a good user experience" then, no?
@lieselotte @pettter @rysiek @micahflee @lambadalambda Well, I'd venture that poor engineering usually leads to a poor user experience sooner or later. The fundamental user expectation is "software that works".
Mastodon and GNU Social and others could all agree to integrate XMPP (or even SMTP) for direct messages. It doesn't need to be in the OStatus protocol.
@lambadalambda It's still up to the admin to set up the xmpp server (with bosh!), though, so it's not very widespread :-/
@HerraBRE @micahflee @rysiek @pettter Note that having private messages work cleanly (and no different than public posts) is one of the things ActivityPub was designed for. The design is much closer to email delivery... outbox -> inbox, w/ to, cc, bcc addressing.
@cwebber @micahflee @pettter interesting!
@cwebber @micahflee @rysiek @pettter I think some of us feel that creating new "private messaging" channels that lack e2e crypto is really not something we should be doing anymore.
@HerraBRE @cwebber @micahflee @pettter OTOH some of us feel we should also not build any more centralized tools, and yet #Signal... ;)
@lambadalambda @micahflee @rysiek Not completely. Riseup rolled out a system a few weeks ago that encrypts all emails with your login passwords. So if they have to hand out data, it will be encrypted data. https://0xacab.org/riseuplabs/trees
Philosophically: The same thing. Granted.
Practically: Huge difference if you ask me.
@micahflee since you mentioned that: https://mastodon.social/@Rushyo/1838982 #e2e
@micahflee yep, I was wondering how to implement this (at least, log what is done "by hand" on the database). Any ideas?
@micahflee end to end encryption is essential for messaging cross-instance too, tbh
@micahflee I'd love to see many thngs and the open source way iz you contribute the things you want to see in the world. Mature, safe, and reliable systems don't happen overnght and this isn't a corporatin with unlimited budget.
@micahflee Honestly, Mastodon gives you a huge honkin warning about trust and everything else says nothing.