You must log in or register to comment.
There aren’t serious technical obstacles but it may be a poor idea if it turns into a hive of abuse. I got into a discussion about implementing forum software a while back and I said I wanted it to have encrypted DM’s, and several operators jumped in and said it would probably attract more trouble than it was worth. People wanting direct private comms can always use encrypted email. On Reddit whenever I wanted to discuss anything the least bit private, I generally asked to exchange email addresses with the person or similar, and went from there in some cases to a self hosted encrypted chat.
Anyway this feature should be weighed somewhat carefully. Are you going to do the thing with warrant canaries? Any attempt at all to conceal metadata? Etc.
On Lemmy you can’t exchange email addresses though… else you’d be exposing the addresses publicly and that’s also rife for spam
Of course you can PM your email address to someone. It’s not encrypted but it’s not exactly public in the sense that spammers can see it.
I was under the impression it wasn’t even truly private, nevermind encrypted. Not actually sure how it works though
It’s somewhat private. Like when you enter your email address to make a Lemmy account, the address is stored on the server. The admins can see it and it could potentially escape in a server breach, but it is not intentionally made public. So most of us don’t worry. The interest in encrypting pm’s is that they can potentially be more sensitive than email addresses.
So the worry is that people will be abusive in private messages and mods will have no chance to moderate that talk?
Yes basically. And also use the pm system for literal crime, bringing heat on the admins.
finally. cant wait to receive dozens of P U S S Y I N B I O messages
Gotta love protected sex
Make it so users can opt out and not be sent messages at all. I have a feeling spam thats harder to moderate is coming.
If it’s with asymmetric encryption, wouldn’t it be possible for the report button to generate a key based on their private key which can only be used to decrypt the given message?
Sounds like you know more about encryption than I do, I would hope they can do that but I still think a full off switch for users would be wise though.
Yeah, end to end encryption means its not possible for someone to intercept the message between person A and person B. Nothing stops person B then forwarding the message to person C to report it.
Yeah as long as theres an (practically) unfalsifiable way to forward the message that sounds very useful, which sounds like there is based on the response to my first comment.
Typically end to end encryption includes digital signing of the message so you can verify who the sender was.
Been forever since I did any work with cryptography, but if my memory is correct:
Alice needs Bob’s public key to verify a signed message from Bob haven’t been altered;
Bob needs Alice’s public key to encrypt a message that can only be decrypted by Alice;
If Bob sends Alice a message encrypted with Alice’s public key, signed with Bob’s private key, containing “Hello, how are you?” ; this message could be verified as authentic by Charlie using Bob’s public key but Charlie cannot see the contents of the message as Charlie does not have Alice’s private key.
Without Alice disclosing their private key, how can Charlie review the content of a reported message from Alice claiming Bob sent them something inappropriate?
I.e. how can Charlie be certain if Alice claims Bob sent “cats are evil” when Charlie cannot decrypt the original message, only verify the original message have not been altered via Bob’s public key.
Aha! Something just clicked — been thinking continuously since before the original reply. The answer is … more signing and maybe even more keys!
A message would be signed multiple times.
If Bob wants to send Alice “Hello, how are you?” the plain text would be signed with Bob’s general private key that could be verified with Bob’s general public key. This would allow Alice to forward this message to anyone while they could still verify it did indeed came from Bob.
The plain text and signature is then encrypted with one of Alice’s public keys, so only Alice could decrypt it to see the message and signature. This may be a thread specific key pair for Alice so they’re not re-using same keys between different threads.
The encrypted message is then again signed by Bob, using one of Bob’s private key, so that Alice can know the encrypted message has not been altered. This here could also be the thread specific key as noted above.
If Alice were to report Bob, Alice will need to include both the plaintext and the internal signature. This way the internally signed message could be reviewed if the plaintext and signature were forwarded to moderation for review by Charlie (just need to verify the signature against plaintext with Bob’s public key), while the exchange should be secure to only Alice and Bob.
Et voila!
It’s been a while since I’ve had to touch it too. But couldn’t Alice provide Charlie with both the plain text and her public key. Charlie could then encrypt the text and see it came out the same as blob Bob sent Alice?
That seems good.
Here’s to hopping lemmy implements it cause frankly the using matrix idea isn’t to my liking . Reasons : I don’t wanna connect another id to an internet forum where any troll can get it, Its easier and better and would solve a major security issue lemmy has, i think matrix is a hot mess for now .
Removed by mod
I think they should use matrix
Removed by mod
Hallelujah
The real question is whether Evan & Tom will take sup’s way of working into account when researching this, or go in a completely different direction.
I really hope this would end up as just security extension, to additionally encrypt something because we can. And not another reinventing of the chat network.
Keeping messages is a recipe for backdoors. There’s a reason signal does not store DMs long term.
“Encrypted DMs”
isn’t that just a longer way of saying “PM”?
PMs today aren’t really private as in E2EE. They’re private as in only you, the receiver and the “trust me bro” company can see them. In special data breach cases, the attacker as well.
please just offer good matrix integration and be done with it
