Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal • Hacker News Board

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#211

Post by kiwidrew » Mon, Feb 01, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

nednar wrote: post #115

kiwidrew wrote: post #29

Yet another "Matrix isn't mature enough so just give up and use a centralized service" post that completely ignores the fact that XMPP is still alive and kicking. With multiple independent implementations (both client and server) that all work together pretty decently. We're never ever going to tear ourselves away from this death by centralization if we keep inventing excuses for why we don't use the federated/distri…

Email is another decentralized, distributed system that is often ignored. The only real difference between chat and email is that the interface makes it seem like chat is quicker. Nothing stops us from writing such interfaces for email as well, though.

Yes, email and IM do have a lot in common -- in particular, XMPP is best visualized as an IMAP-like client/server protocol plus an SMTP-like server/server protocol that both share an XML schema (ugh) for describing the messages akin to how MIME (another ugh) functions for email.

As another commenter has pointed out, Delta.chat shows just how closely an email client can mimic the chat/IM interface.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#212

Post by southerntofu » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #207

southerntofu wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they do. That's why millions of us have been pushing for years for DNSSEC, TLS (hopefully someday with DANE), Tor onion services, RPKI, etc.. A bad state of affairs is no reason to keep going in the wrong direction.

DANE is a PKI whose roots are controlled by world governments, so pushing for it as an alternative to "single actors" doesn't make much sense.

ICANN's DNS roots are flawed by centralization, and DNS itself is a very insecure protocol. However, DANE is still a major progress over the browser CAs, because you can stop trusting random corporations and state agencies (the CAs, who are known to emit fake certificates) and instead trust your naming scheme.

Agreed DNS might not be the best candidate for this. However DNSSEC validation within the LAN (eg. on your local router, not @Google/CloudFlare) mitigates a lot of risks associated, and a new secure backward-compatible protocol like the GNU Name System (yes that's a thing) may eventually overcome those risks entirely in clever ways.

There's literature and actual deployments on tying name resolution to public key discovery in location-addressed protocols (eg. .onion, .i2p..) and it makes entire sense in my view. If such concerns interest you, check out the latest GNS draft RFC: https://lsd.gnunet.org/lsd0001

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#213

Post by reagent_finder » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

the_why_of_y wrote: post #150

reagent_finder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that's pretty disingenuous. Like you noticed the server-side code is active, and changing server address would be a niche-of-a-niche activity. Also, what would be the point of going after Signal's servers? Even if a/the government got a hold of all the data in there, it's encrypted with client keys. I mean sure, if they took over secretly and became a malicious MITM that's different, but it's still only for an…

Telegram does not use Signal's protocol, Telegram's protocol is designed from scratch. https://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams-crypt...

Ah true, MTProto is unique, looks like.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#214

Post by tptacek » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #212

tptacek wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DANE is a PKI whose roots are controlled by world governments, so pushing for it as an alternative to "single actors" doesn't make much sense.

ICANN's DNS roots are flawed by centralization, and DNS itself is a very insecure protocol. However, DANE is still a major progress over the browser CAs, because you can stop trusting random corporations and state agencies (the CAs, who are known to emit fake certificates) and instead trust your naming scheme. Agreed DNS might not be the best candidate for this. However DNSSEC validation within the LAN (eg. on your l…

No, DANE is a step back from CAs. When the Certificate Transparency logs show a CA has misissued, any of Google, Apple, or Microsoft can destroy that CA, as has happened with several of the largest CAs. Meanwhile, not only is there no such thing as Certificate Transparency for DANE, but you also can't revoke .COM at all.

Pretty much every way you look at DANE, it's a debacle.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#215

Post by feanaro » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #210

feanaro wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying it's not true in the general case either. In fact, taking into account other things I've said, my claim is that Synapse can easily run on a home computer or a relatively cheap/weak VPS. In what sense is it then true that you have to be a large organization and have a powerful machine to be able to run it?

The fact that you are disputed in saying this by multiple comments on this thread suggests it’s not as simple as just accusing someone of spreading falsehoods. Here is a quote: “speaking as the project lead for Matrix. 1. It's true that Synapse can use a lot of RAM.”

I was not contesting that, I was contesting the claim that you have to be a large organization and/or have a lot of money to be able to run Synapse. This is untrue. Stop moving the goalposts.