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France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

reuters.com

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Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#121

Post by miopa »

chimeracoder wrote: post #120
miopa wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (i.e: not much). Not sure if I'm 100% right here, but knowing all my contacts and when I communicate with whom is an awful much.

> Not sure if I'm 100% right here, but knowing all my contacts and when I communicate with whom is an awful much. Signal actually doesn't know all your contacts - you can check the source code to confirm that it doesn't know about any contacts that you don't message using Signal, for example. Signal also doesn't store most of the metadata that it could, so it really knows incredibly little about its users. It knows (…

>Signal actually doesn't know all your contacts - you can check the source code to confirm that it doesn't know about any contacts that you don't message using Signal, for example.

I get a message in the app when a contact starts using Signal, so it has to know them server-side.

The other part of the comment was reffering to what the server could know (in the gov. case - will know), and that IS quite a lot (assuming Signal style service).

And I do trust Moxie nominally, but I also believe that he will obey US courts.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#122

Post by greenhouse_gas »

Arathorn wrote: post #81
amelius wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. Why would you need to do that? Why not just give every message a timestamp, make sure they get sent, and sort the messages on the receiver side? If you're really concerned about message order, you could give every message a unique id, and send out the id of the previous message with every message, and improve your sort func…

Absolute timestamps cannot be trusted in a byzantine environment, so we do precisely as you suggest - messages are transmitted with pointers to the previous message(s) in the room message graph, so you get a partial ordering within the room (just like git). We also sign the messages into a merkle graph (like git) to stop the shared datastructure being tampered with.

So it's a blockchain! /s

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#123

Post by Arathorn »

walterbell wrote: post #117
Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

Is Matrix planning to use MLS for interop with other E2E systems? https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/

Good question.

We're participating on the periphery of the MLS discussions, mainly to try to encourage the MLS team to consider and support decentralised use cases.

At the moment there's a temptation to go for a simpler approach which assumes there's a centralised sequencing server which solves all the races you otherwise get (and which have plagued us in Matrix whilst implementing Megolm). However, assuming a centralised focal point for each group conversation kills the whole point of decentralisation, so we're trying to ensure it's not designed out.

See https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/mls/MnLJkbJ_Mwe8Oz0Ll6... for the gory details.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#124

Post by Arathorn »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #122
Arathorn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute timestamps cannot be trusted in a byzantine environment, so we do precisely as you suggest - messages are transmitted with pointers to the previous message(s) in the room message graph, so you get a partial ordering within the room (just like git). We also sign the messages into a merkle graph (like git) to stop the shared datastructure being tampered with.

So it's a blockchain! /s

https://twitter.com/whitequark/status/946886702932557824 :D

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#125

Post by BrandoElFollito »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #2

Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…

Or the phones nobody in our gouvernement wants to use (slow, old tech, freezes alk the time).

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#126

Post by ptman »

jlpom wrote: post #85
Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

As I understand Matrix is not a fork of Riot, Riot is just a client for a Matrix synapse server (there are others like WeChat) provided by the devs.

wechat != weechat

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#127

Post by stevenicr »

Arathorn wrote: post #36
tenryuu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though? Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?

you simplify the ux (eg autodiscovering the right homeserver); hook it up to directory services and/or SSO; simplify the e2e crypto UX; change the logo and branding, and have a basis to build on for whatever future custom features they need.

This sounds great! I am looking forward to running it.

But I also need an admin panel to lookup user ip addys from the past 36 hours, ability to assign moderator user roles who can see other user's ips, ban ip addys, subnets, hostnames and cidrs easily.

Love to have some other needed admin options and run this! A stun / turn server to hide other user's ip addys and such as well, interception of images posted so they are scanned, exif stripped and hosted temporarily rather than giving the hoster everyone's ip info.

Stuff like that.

I guess blocking users from joining the huge main matrix channels through our server would cut down on the ram / processing needed..

I wonder if something like https://access.watch could hook into this, or if it needs something all in it's own language or what. Looking forward to this system growing.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#128

Post by StudentStuff »

lorenzhs wrote: post #89
StudentStuff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, you either get massive battery life degradation or your messages won't get through, there isn't much of a choice there unless you use push messaging. Google Cloud Messaging allows Signal's servers to send a "Hey, wake up and connect to us!" message to your phone, and every other app uses GCM for this as Google has spent a ton of time trying to optimize both reachability and battery life with GCM. Maybe some…

Not only that, Google apparently has agreements with mobile network operators to ensure that their long-lived connections don't get closed after a few seconds or minutes of inactivity. Some mobile ISPs close idle connections after as little as ten seconds, so unless you're in a position to negotiate with just about every major mobile network operator worldwide, you can't really offer the same level of service.

Apple likely has similar agreements too. I'm hoping that IPv6 will help alleviate many of these issues, as while your address may change as you move between towns, the state table needing to be maintained will be much less complex.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#129

Post by Arathorn »

mxuribe wrote: post #115

This is awesome to see! My only wish was that matrix and riot were clearly mentioned. This would have significantly raised the profiles of both projects that I'm a big fan of. To @Arathorn and any other members of matrix and riot teams, kudos on this news, and great job! Next step - of course, beyond the tech work already being done on the platforms - is to promote the heck out of this news!! ;-) EDIT: Ok, there's at…

thanks :) the problem here is that the government comms guys simply don’t know about Matrix or care about the underlying protocol, hence lack of reference to Matrix. Hopefully the word will get out anyway!

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#130

Post by Arathorn »

motohagiography wrote: post #100

Is there a reason a crypto messenger team wouldn't seem to publish their protocol specs using BAN notation that people can objectively reason about, and then verify the implementation of it in the code? As in, if you can't explain it this clearly, what's the problem? http://www.lsv.fr/Software/spore/table.html Having worked on some crypto projects, the admonition to, "just read the code," is disingenuous, because wit…

the crypto specs are https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/olm.rst and https://git.matrix.org/git/olm/about/docs/megolm.rst (amongst others).
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