Give us an app where everything, including metadata, is end-to-end encrypted and works at "web scale". No one other than the people in the conversation can know who is talking to who and when. Then figure out a way to pay the bills to run the infrastructure and pay the people working on the app and also make a profit. (A novel idea: Maybe charge people to use the app?)
If I could raise enough money to replace my dayjob, I would totally do this. I'm guessing it's not doable, but I put together a quick Google Form to gauge interest. If anyone would be interested, please submit the form[1]
[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1sl5MI1Mxna6RBTXB...
> Maybe charge people to use the app?
Who will pay for a service that's offered for free by at least 3 major messaging apps?
This is what I do.
Because what’s even the general use case of using Signal and WhatsApp (in their current forms)?
Because then it would just be weird talking to friends and family. And with those few people you want to be totally anonymous with? Those apps and services which are already anonymous.
Will be awesome if Signal adds that feature? Yes. But even then I would still ise dedicated anonymous apps.
Signal doesn't allow creating multiple identities for different contexts (without using multiple phones).
And depending on your personal risk profile (e.g. journalists protecting their sources), phone numbers are extremely difficult to acquire anonymously in many countries. In most EU countries, you need to show photo ID to register prepaid SIM cards these days.
In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number via the internet that works fine on Signal. There is no requirement that the SIM card in your phone be the number you use to register on Signal, or that the number even be a GSM number.
My Signal number is a Google Voice number, for example. Anyone with access to a US GSM number can create these; many are for sale for anonymous payment methods.
It’s easy to use Signal anonymously in any country that has mostly uncensored internet.
How? And even if that's feasible (for many people I'd argue it's too big a hurdle) it still only gets you pseudonymity.
There are some interesting encrypted messaging ideas floating around that allow you to have per-contact or even per-conversation keys or multiple identities for different contexts; Signal is just not doing much in that regard.
You’d need multiple phones and a phone number per context to be actually anonymous. That’s just not practicable for many people, I’d say.
* there’s lots of free competition, including Signal, which is free and decent.
* you’d probably need to open source it if you want to convince anyone it was trustworthy
* what if you want to message somebody that doesn’t want to pay?
Of course maybe a huge company could work this out… but it seems fundamentally very hard
Any sort of project that actively tries to minimize data collection will not be profitable. At least not in this current economic system. They will have to be non-profit (Signal, etc), or run by volunteers (Cwtch, Briar).
If the network or server has no idea where to deliver an encrypted message, then the only way to guarantee delivery is to send all the messages to all the users to unpack to see which ones are relevant to them, which fails "web scale"
There might be problems with the proposed model, but they aren't the problems you suggested.
(As an individual, you wouldn't want to download just your own inbox. But to obfuscate, you can download a random subset of inboxes that often-enough includes your own.)
And if you want to be anonymous you can't filter by the last message you've received, so every time you pull your inbox, you're getting the last X time in messages. So if I have multiple active group chats, that would really start to add up.
Videos and images like every other messaging service would have to be anonymized the same way. Even 10x noise polling for a 10MB video would be too much data on phones and probably not enough to anonymous. How about obfuscating the sender? Would a sender be uploading 10x trash, not just text but also video, messages in every inbox?
If you only download the index for specific users, that's no different than an inbox: if you pull the index for an inbox and don't pull all the associated blocks (including videos), that's obviously not your box.
The other alternative is downloading the entire index for every single block, which sounds even worse than just downloading random complete inboxes with videos. Especially if the blocks are going to be filled with trash inboxes filled with trash data to obfuscate the sender. Even my own blocks would get trash data including videos that I have to download to pretend it's real.
Ie any block could be useful for multiple inboxes and messages. See also how freenet used to do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
That's why Tor makes you bounce between multiple nodes, to decrease the chance you get only nodes that belong to a tracker. Actually not sure why I didn't think of Tor as something that already fulfills all those anonymous requirements. It's also an example of the drawbacks of being completely anonymous, that network is extremely slow and will definitely not scale to anything mainstream.
Some Bitcoin SPV clients have tried solving an almost equivalent problem, but the obvious approach does not work for various subtle reasons: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/763.pdf
Check out alt.cryptography (I think) if you can.
The Briar way of doing things actually solves an important E2EE usability issue. Since the cryptographic identity is the only identity, it is much harder for the user to end up using the system without a verified identity.
>No one other than the people in the conversation can know who is talking to who and when.
This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages.
Not necessarily. Eg as a simple model, assume that you 'send' a message by publishing it to something like a usenet group (and perhaps that group charges you a fraction of a cent for doing so).
There's no denial-of-service for a client that receives a lot of messages, distributed or otherwise, but still outsider don't see who is sending what to whom.
SMTP is an example of this succeeding, as problematic as that protocol is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid
> Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first, networked application framework.
> The framework is conceptually similar to IPFS and Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services over a privately routed network.
> The framework enables development of fully-distributed applications without a 'blockchain' or a 'transactional layer' at their base.
> The framework can be included as part of user-facing applications or run as a 'headless node' for power users who wish to help build the network.
https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ
> VeilidChat is a chat application written for the Veilid distributed application platform. It has a familiar and simple interface and is designed for private, and secure person-to-person communications.
https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat
Previously:
Veilid is an open-source, P2P, mobile-first, networked application framework
180 points 4 months ago 71 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124
Cult of the Dead Cow wants to save internet privacy with new encryption protocol
141 points 4 months ago 79 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018404
https://gizmodo.com/cult-of-the-dead-cow-launches-veilid-enc...