abadideaFeb 13

When I said that your discord clone doesn’t need e2ee, I got a lot of comments along the lines of “ then how would I use it to organize the revolution!” The answer is: you don’t. If you have more users than can comfortably share a Signal chat and hence want to use discord or something like it, you cannot POSSIBLY be vetting all of them to a high standard of trust. Your logs ARE leaking. End-to-end encryption between more people than can fit around a dinner table is pointless.

This article confirms what I already assumed, that “open source [information sense, not code sense] intelligence gathering on social media” includes, for the US government, asking for links to join groups that may *feel* private. My own discord has literally like a thousand idlers. It would be very *lucky* if none of them were logging for potentially nefarious purposes! And I remind the active users of this occasionally.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-ice-masks-up-in-more-ways

Exclusive: ICE Masks Up in More Ways Than One

Feds could be in your group chat

Ken Klippenstein
Show thread5225225Feb 13

@0xabad1dea to be honest, i disagree, not because it's safe to fedpost in a chat of hundreds of users, but because it makes e2ee itself less suspicious, and more noisy to infiltrate

yes, a fed can lurk in a large member count e2ee chat, but that still involves the effort to join, and possibly even talk sometimes when spoken to. and they'll absolutely not be in every chat.

as opposed to "hey discord let us run grep across your message database"

like, we're at the point for the web where every website[maintained] is encrypted, even if it would be fine for most to be plaintext. (and we got to that point by making TLS pretty much free)

e2ee is only really considered optional/a misfeature in some cases because it's not free, but it should be.

Show threadabadideaFeb 13
@5225225 sorry, I can't hear you. maybe we should both just delete all our keys and generate new ones? just click through whatever warning it shows you, this happens all the time
Show thread5225225Feb 13

@0xabad1dea :sigh:

my point is it should be reliable enough to be mandatory and seamless.

are we there yet? no

should it be a goal, as opposed to saying "well, in 15 years we should still leak all our messages to whatever server hosts them"? yes

you don't click through invalid cert warnings when logging into your bank because TLS works, and e2ee should get to that point

is it okay for a discord "competitor" now to not bother with mandatory e2ee because they wouldn't be able to make it seamless?

honestly, sure. i don't care. the problems people have with discord aren't the lack of e2ee, so something else also lacking e2ee isn't making that problem worse.

but "e2ee is a misfeature" is because of bugs which can be fixed, and design decisions that can be weakened to favor usability over security in some cases, not e2ee being inherently bad.

Show threadZ̈oéFeb 13
@5225225 @0xabad1dea matrix tried (and still tries) to make e2ee group chats work but either the problem is significantly harder than people imagine, their developers are incompetent, or both. because it is still a pain with hundreds of people, and a disaster with thousands. SSL/TLS works so well because the clients don’t generally need to auth themselves from the server point of view
Show threadSIN001E/R-SINE | ΘΔ🦈 | 🏳‍⚧

@0xabad1dea @uint8_t @5225225 i looked into this when i was considering making a discord clone a while back

the problem with e2ee is mainly that it doesn't scale to the point a Discordlike needs

there is no proper multi-party asynchronous key exchange mechanism that exists, so all clients must have the keys of all other clients and individually encrypt each message to everyone

that's not a problem with a single-channel Signal group, but the volume of messages is magnitudes higher even in a small Discord; with e2ee what would be one message in client-server encryption becomes as many messages as there are users

and it gets even worse when media is involved, let alone something like group video calls

Feb 13 at 1:29pmWeb
Show threadSIN001E/R-SINE | ΘΔ🦈 | 🏳‍⚧Feb 13
@0xabad1dea @uint8_t @5225225 and to add to that, i doubt an async multi-party async key exchange algo is coming anytime soon either, hell i'm not convinced it's even possible