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Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

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Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#91

Post by em-bee »

rahen wrote: post #85
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…

edit: I was wrong, Delta Chat now has forward secrecy from v1.48: https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime Furthermore metadata transparency can be made less problematic by using email aliases.

forward secrecy seems to apply to realtime connections, not to messages sent over SMTP.

now what's interesting here is a potential future development of deltachat where SMTP is only used to negotiate the peer to peer connection, and the actual chat messages are sent over the direct connection. although it sounds kind of weird to build a chat solution on top of SMTP and then bypass SMTP in the end.

the remaining benefit would be the ability to talk to people who don't use deltachat. not needing another account on a new service. not needing to develop or maintain server infrastructure.

wait, in a way it's already there: https://github.com/ArcaneCircle/live-chat

now adapt that to storing messages... ;-)

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#92

Post by em-bee »

miroljub wrote: post #90
em-bee wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a long time ago i envisioned that mail clients should really display mails as a conversation just like you describe. a list with all my contacts. and opening the contact gives me all emails received and sent with that contact. if you want to use different aliases in deltachat, i think the best option for now is to create different deltachat profiles for each. you can have multiple profiles active at once and you get…

Yes, but the issue is they all share the same inbox, and my email server doesn't support server-side incoming filters so I can distribute mails to separate inbox folders that would be monitored by DeltaChat. Alias is a standard email feature. If Delta Chat want's to be usable as a general mail client, aliases should just work.

you are right. i haven't thought about the shared inbox. deltachat would have to have support for that in some form.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#93

Post by balamatom »

thecrash wrote: post #62
balamatom wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let's face it, people over here just don't like Meta and love to spread FUD about them. It's called punching upwards. >Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a proprietary delivery m…

Builds are signed by the software publisher, not the Play Store. So the store alone couldn't corrupt releases, it would need collaboration by the publisher. (Google does have a service for app developers where they keep and manage your signing keys for you, but it's not required)

Interesting! Who checks those signatures?

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#94

Post by immibis »

lxgr wrote: post #78
immibis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As programmers, is it not our natural instinct to create a ChatSystem and MailSystem on top of a GenericMessageDeliverySystem? When did we stop doing that? Creating a brand new GenericMessageDeliverySystem for each purpose comes with substantial costs. We don't reinvent the Internet to create WhatsApp.

What generic message delivery system are you talking about, though? SMTP is optimized for the use case of email; XMPP is optimized for one-to-one instant messaging; Matrix is optimized for "Slack-like" chat. I highly doubt that these three use cases are similar enough to warrant introducing an additional common protocol/layer.

Optimized how?

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#95

Post by logankeenan »

rapnie wrote: post #2

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 con…

I’ve been experimenting with Iroh over the past month. It’s been such a pleasant experience. Previously, I created a p2p connection with webrtc and had to create a layer on top of that to use request/response style communication between nodes. I can throw that all away with Iroh and focus on the product. It’s a relief.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#96

Post by wink »

hkt wrote: post #34
foul wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is a communication system with a lot of moving parts. You can't have reliable IM through existing MX servers but you may have it if for example SMTPs are running on your machine and you poll their data more (it's just an example, I know that with an SMTP running on your phone you'd have more problems).

See earlier on today's front page, another all in one mail server. It is much, much simpler than it was to do this. I've been self hosting email for nearly 20 years and the state of the art is considerably better now. Latency is virtually nonexistent and federation works.

I'd say it's good enough - but I refuse to call a conversation over email "reliable" as in the properties I expect from a realtime messenger.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#97

Post by rakoo »

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 your device is confiscated your entire history is in the clear. Forward secrecy doesn't magically solve problems, it's useful if you use ephemeral messages. In DC if there's a window of time where you want messages to not be traceable you just create a new email adress (which is just one click in DC thanks to chatmail) and delete that address after, that's it.

Re: Delta Chat – Email Based PGP Encrypted Chat

#100

Post by AlexeyBelov »

7bit wrote: post #71
fdb345 wrote: post #67

The most important factor with email, is that your inbox is encrypted at rest at all times... and cannot be bruteforced. The chances of your email messages being 'man in the middled' are almost non-existent. Its a micro-percent of live investigations that does this. The police RELY ON finding messages in either your inbox or the recipients. It doesnt matter if they are encrypted or not in reality. Of course they'd li…

You have? Why?

Because people lie on the internet
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