Aral BalkanFeb 16, 2023

Live stream, today at 5PM Irish Time (GMT): Small is Beautiful

Topic: End-to-end encrypted Kitten Chat

It’s just me this month and I’m going to take you through converting a traditional centralised Kitten WebSocket chat¹ to an end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer one² for the Small Web³.

Watch live at: https://owncast.small-web.org

(You can follow our stream from your fediverse account to be notified when it goes live. A big thank-you to the 755 of you who already do.) :)

#SmallWeb #SmallIsBeautiful

Small Technology Foundation

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Small Technology Foundation
Show threadAral Balkan

¹ https://codeberg.org/kitten/app#kitten-chat
² https://codeberg.org/kitten/app#end-to-end-encrypted-kitten-chat
³ https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

#SmallWeb #SmallIsBeautiful

Feb 16, 2023 at 9:58amWeb
Show threadAral BalkanFeb 16, 2023

Ahead of today’s stream on implementing a basic end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer Small Web chat example with #Kitten, here are some accessible resources on the math behind the #encryption:

1. @martin’s excellent Implementing #Curve25519/#X25519: A Tutorial on Elliptic Curve #Cryptography (https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/curve25519.pdf)

2. The Animated Elliptic Curve (Visualizing Elliptic Curve Cryptography) https://curves.xargs.org/ and Hands-on: X25519 Key Exchange https://x25519.xargs.org/ by Michael Driscoll

Show threadAral BalkanFeb 16, 2023

(Note that you don’t have to understand the math behind it to use it but it doesn’t hurt, as a developer, to have a high-level understanding at least. Also note that we don‘t roll our own encryption. We rely on standard TLS to secure data in transit and Diffie-Hellman key exchange with Curve25519 as implemented by Paul Miller’s excellent (tiny/auditable) noble-ed25519 library (https://github.com/paulmillr/noble-ed25519) for protecting data at rest.)

#Kitten #e2ee #cryptography #encryption

GitHub - paulmillr/noble-ed25519: Fastest 4KB JS implementation of ed25519 signatures

Fastest 4KB JS implementation of ed25519 signatures - paulmillr/noble-ed25519

GitHub
Show threadSardoFeb 16, 2023
@aral, have you thought using libp2p for this?
Show threadAral BalkanFeb 16, 2023

@sardo Looks interesting, but no, the idea behind the Small Web is that we all have our own servers and they become the always on, easily addressable nodes in an emergent peer-to-peer network.

There are definitely other p2p approaches, some of them way more peer-to-peer in their design but the Small Web is still the web in a lot of ways.

(Also, I try to stay away from platforms by venture capital funded entities like Protocol Labs.) :)