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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

#81

Post by Arathorn »

amelius wrote: post #77
Arathorn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches…

> 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.

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

#82

Post by thrasff »

spacenick88 wrote: post #23
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…

Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

For all the hate XML gets... it's not that bad. Certainly not worth switching protocols for. Main problems with XMPP is a divided ecosystem where different clients and servers support different features, and that multi-client encryption is severely flaky.

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

#84

Post by Vinnl »

pmlnr wrote: post #49
ersiees wrote: post #3

What about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.

Signal doesn't work with desktop _only_ (without ever touching a smartphone). Matrix and XMPP does.

I've seen (at least in a dev build) support for activating an account on desktop, i.e. you enter a confirmation code sent via SMS to a phone number you chose. That phone number needn't necessarily only be accessible through a smartphone, I'd presume.

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

#85

Post by jlpom »

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.

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

#86

Post by amelius »

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.

Ok, makes sense now, thanks!

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

#87

Post by x1798DE »

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.

I think he means the project is a lightweight fork of Riot.im, which is using the Matrix protocol.

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

#88

Post by pmlnr »

thrasff wrote: post #82
spacenick88 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

For all the hate XML gets... it's not that bad. Certainly not worth switching protocols for. Main problems with XMPP is a divided ecosystem where different clients and servers support different features, and that multi-client encryption is severely flaky.

At least multi-client encryption exists for XMPP, unlike for WhatsApp.

See https://omemo.top/

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

#89

Post by lorenzhs »

StudentStuff wrote: post #68
alt678 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik they would still need Google Services, based in the US obviously, to run Signal. There's technically an APK on the Signal website without Gapps, but it's not officially supported by the development team. On their issue tracker they "leave it to the open source folks", i.e. ignore serious bugs like massive battery life degradation and Signal silently not updating for hours.

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.

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

#90

Post by amelius »

girvo wrote: post #83
amelius wrote: post #72

When are they rolling their own CPUs, in light of Intel ME and associated surveillance risk?

So if it can’t be perfect we might as well give up? One time pads or go home?

No, I was just wondering how far they are prepared to go.
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