Keyhive – Local-first access control

We’re evaluating Keyhive for use in our distributed chat application and my colleague wrote an in-depth explainer on Keyhive’s underlying Key Encapsulation Mechanism BeeKEM, which is a decentralized offshoot of TreeKEM used in MLS: http://meri.garden/a-deep-dive-explainer-on-beekem-protocol/

Ink and Switch has been such a source of joy for me. I like reading their articles because they come from such a different place than what you currently see in most software (Cloud based subscriptions). Just a breath of fresh air backed by cool tech and cool people. Thanks!

Their claim that every request goes through the hot path of a central auth db is stretching the truth quite a bit. With Oauth2 you get a signed access token once from the Id Provider, then you reuse this token several times until it’s given expiry time has run out. It is up to the resource server to validate the token scope, signature and the expiry time. This can be done offline as long as the resource server has the public key of the IdP. Ssh certificates work the same way.

Obviously, now the resource server instead becomes your central guard of access, and is far from a local-first crypto based solution as they describe. Just that the way it’s pictured sounded overly dramatic.

That callout card on the top of the site really messed with my brain with it being slightly tilted

Note: this has absolutely nothing to do with the Windows registry, despite the name

Cool. I think you could use a CRDT (even a simple LWW structure) on top of Nostr which already works and has all of the properties you are looking for.