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Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

delta.chat

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Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#2

Post by rapnie »

The landing page may be a bit too minimal in giving overview of this cool project. I really liked the direction towards real-time P2P networking, based on Iroh [0]. See the blog post about this [1].

> After almost two years of collaboration with the wonderful Iroh team, and years of discussions with numerous experts in the decentralization space, we are happy to announce that Delta Chat 1.48 apps on all platforms contain state-of-the-art Peer-to-Peer networking support, including hole punching and forward-secret end-to-end encryption. Concretely, Delta Chat now establishes private Peer-to-Peer gossipping networks between users who start a webxdc app that uses the new joinRealtimeChannel() API.

[0] https://iroh.computer/

[1] https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#6

Post by rahen »

On the positive side, the use of P2P and IMAP makes censorship difficult, which is a strong advantage in authoritarian regimes.

However this comes with serious trade-offs. PGP lacks forward secrecy: if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted. Also IMAP offers no metadata privacy, anyone can see who you email and how often.

Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy with their double ratchet encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm).

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#7

Post by HelloUsername »

Previous discussions:

24-jan-2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25893626 148 comments

07-jan-2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25674894 4 commments

27-feb-2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263357 11 comments

21-feb-2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216827 56 comments

03-feb-2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13560279 1 comment

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#9

Post by miroljub »

rahen wrote: post #6

On the positive side, the use of P2P and IMAP makes censorship difficult, which is a strong advantage in authoritarian regimes. However this comes with serious trade-offs. PGP lacks forward secrecy: if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted. Also IMAP offers no metadata privacy, anyone can see who you email and how often. Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy with their double ratch…

> Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy

WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven. And remember that both WhatsApp and Signal are legally required not to disclose to you whether they are spying on you or not.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#10

Post by mubou »

rahen wrote: post #6

On the positive side, the use of P2P and IMAP makes censorship difficult, which is a strong advantage in authoritarian regimes. However this comes with serious trade-offs. PGP lacks forward secrecy: if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted. Also IMAP offers no metadata privacy, anyone can see who you email and how often. Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy with their double ratch…

> if a key leaks, all past messages can be decrypted

Not to mention, if you revoke a key (maybe because you lost your laptop and want to be proactive about security), without any authenticated timestamping service in the mix, all past messages and signatures can no longer be trusted, regardless of the revocation date. That's why when you revoke a key on github, all your previous commits' signatures turn red.

I've never understood why no one's succeeded in doing anything about this after all these years.

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