this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
1506 points (99.2% liked)

Technology

59111 readers
3251 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
1506
The creator of Pixelfed announced an upcoming encrypted messenger for the fediverse that will work across the fediverse (mastodon.social)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by nix@merv.news to c/technology@lemmy.world
156 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It will be open source, end to end encrypted using Signal’s double ratchet encryption protocol, and he plans to make it easy for fediverse platforms to integrate it. The beta will release later this month.

He’s also the creator of https://fedidb.org btw

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] KLISHDFSDF@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're right, Signal is not P2P. The way Signals messaging pipeline works is like this - note I'm oversimplifying it for accessibility.

Sending a message to Bob

  1. You press Send.
  2. The message is encrypted on your device with a key that can only be unlocked by Bob.
  3. The message is then "sealed" so that there's only a "deliver to" field visible (not a "from").
  4. The "deliver to" field is addressed with a hashed/salted label for Bob - this means Signal's server can see its a unique user, but not what their name is.
  5. The message is finally sent to Signal's servers.
  6. Your message sits on Signals servers until it can be delivered to the intended recipient.

you can’t really do user lookups without some sort of middleware in the cloud.

See their blog post about Private Contact Discovery, they've spent a long time figuring out how to engineer a method to know as little as possible about you.

[–] InfiniteStruggle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago

Thanks for the explanation.