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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

#91

Post by madez »

edhelas wrote: post #6

Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution. But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "w…

XMPP is legacy, and rightfully so. With it, by default, communication is in cleartext, there is no way to ensure message reliability and integrity without privacy implications, and multi-device support is arkward.

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

#92

Post by kuschku »

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"?

If you think XMPP is bad, take a look at Matrix’s "new HTTP connection for each sent or received batch of messages", thanks to HTTP longpolling.

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

#93

Post by secfirstmd »

hugg wrote: post #80
Arathorn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

were doing exactly that at the place i work at, riot has too many settings and can be quite hard for a "normal" user (someone who is used to slack for example). would love some kind of integration with openid connect though, since that would enable us to easier integrate with our AD. of course we could make that ourselves but we dont have the manpower right now.

Really? We are looking to use it for some of our work but are aware that the UI/UX esp around keys is a bit messy. Would be great to see how your simplifying it.

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

#94

Post by Promarged »

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…

> France has adopted Matrix for the project

Could you provide a source for this?

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

#95

Post by Promarged »

pmlnr wrote: post #88
thrasff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Also, there is relatively minor subset of features that provide good messaging experience: https://conversations.im/compliance/

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

#96

Post by Arathorn »

Promarged wrote: post #94
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…

> France has adopted Matrix for the project Could you provide a source for this?

I'm the project lead for Matrix. Failing that, on the French side there's been some press where they've confirmed the system is built on Matrix & Riot (https://www.nextinpact.com/news/106463-la-france-travaille-a..., although it's behind a paywall), plus others have spotted the Github repository too.

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

#97

Post by StavrosK »

Promarged wrote: post #94
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…

> France has adopted Matrix for the project Could you provide a source for this?

I'm guessing he is the source.

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

#98

Post by superkuh »

tenryuu wrote: post #22
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…

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?

I like (and use) Riot.im but as an electron app that uses ~300 MB of RAM (I just checked) it is definitely not lightweight.

I can't think of any way they could make it lightweight either. Maybe if they treated the JS as pseudocode and re-implemented as native clients.

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

#99

Post by Promarged »

Arathorn wrote: post #96
Promarged wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France has adopted Matrix for the project Could you provide a source for this?

I'm the project lead for Matrix. Failing that, on the French side there's been some press where they've confirmed the system is built on Matrix & Riot ( https://www.nextinpact.com/news/106463-la-france-travaille-a... , although it's behind a paywall), plus others have spotted the Github repository too.

Thanks!

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

#100

Post by motohagiography »

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 without a formal spec, you have nothing to compare the code to or evaluate the code against.

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