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XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

notes.nicfab.it

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Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#2
Hi! Glad to see XMPP on the HN first page this morning :)

I'm working on a social-network and IM web platform (for 12 years already!), fully built on XMPP https://movim.eu/.

Thanks to its extensibility and the PubSub XMPP standard (see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html) you can easily build social-network like features. The standard is pretty simple, it's Atom 1.0 transport within PubSub (see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html).

For those that likes RSS/Atom you can also easily publish Atom newsfeed to PubSub (see https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub) and follow your favorite website using your XMPP account and with real-time pushed articles. Here is ArsTechnica as an example https://mov.im/?node/news.movim.eu/ArsTechnica

XMPP is not only for IM, but way more than that ;)

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#3
post #2

Hi! Glad to see XMPP on the HN first page this morning :) I'm working on a social-network and IM web platform (for 12 years already!), fully built on XMPP https://movim.eu/ . Thanks to its extensibility and the PubSub XMPP standard (see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html ) you can easily build social-network like features. The standard is pretty simple, it's Atom 1.0 transport within PubSub (see https://xmpp.o…

I've seen movim around but I have never actually tried it. This post gave me the push. So thank you for that. I do have a question though:

On https://mov.im/?login it says:

"Login using any XMPP account or create a new one"

But it only shows me a login form where I can enter my xmpp address and a password. This signals to me that I can log into my existing non-movim-xmpp account, but I have to enter my password on there? That can't be right. What am I misunderstanding ?

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#4
Encryption is "activily bein worked on", sound about right - I never got encryption to work across two of my own devices with a third party.

Yet I do not understand why a rewrite of messaging as [matrix] was necessary, when XMPP was already there and matrix did not even have an edit-message feature on release, perhaps not even now.

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#5
post #4

Encryption is "activily bein worked on", sound about right - I never got encryption to work across two of my own devices with a third party. Yet I do not understand why a rewrite of messaging as [matrix] was necessary, when XMPP was already there and matrix did not even have an edit-message feature on release, perhaps not even now.

Matrix supports encryption out-of-the-box without any strange key exchange problems. Most of the time the way key exchange is done in XMPP is very insecure.

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#6
post #4

Encryption is "activily bein worked on", sound about right - I never got encryption to work across two of my own devices with a third party. Yet I do not understand why a rewrite of messaging as [matrix] was necessary, when XMPP was already there and matrix did not even have an edit-message feature on release, perhaps not even now.

from https://github.com/movim/movim/issues/63

>"edhelas commented Nov 26, 2021

As OMEMO is now part of Movim master and that the main working features are working I'm considering this ticket as solved. There is still a lot of small things to fix but the main is done.

It took 6 years but Movim is finally having end to end encryptio edhelas commented Nov 26, 2021

As OMEMO is now part of Movim master and that the main working features are working I'm considering this ticket as solved. There is still a lot of small things to fix but the main is done.

It took 6 years but Movim is finally having end to end encryption."

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#7
post #5
post #4

Encryption is "activily bein worked on", sound about right - I never got encryption to work across two of my own devices with a third party. Yet I do not understand why a rewrite of messaging as [matrix] was necessary, when XMPP was already there and matrix did not even have an edit-message feature on release, perhaps not even now.

Matrix supports encryption out-of-the-box without any strange key exchange problems. Most of the time the way key exchange is done in XMPP is very insecure.

> Most of the time the way key exchange is done in XMPP is very insecure.

How so?

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#8
post #4

Encryption is "activily bein worked on", sound about right - I never got encryption to work across two of my own devices with a third party. Yet I do not understand why a rewrite of messaging as [matrix] was necessary, when XMPP was already there and matrix did not even have an edit-message feature on release, perhaps not even now.

Well, matrix does a lot of things different. A rewrite seems pretty unavoidable with hat many and significant changes

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#9
post #5
post #4

Encryption is "activily bein worked on", sound about right - I never got encryption to work across two of my own devices with a third party. Yet I do not understand why a rewrite of messaging as [matrix] was necessary, when XMPP was already there and matrix did not even have an edit-message feature on release, perhaps not even now.

Matrix supports encryption out-of-the-box without any strange key exchange problems. Most of the time the way key exchange is done in XMPP is very insecure.

> Most of the time the way key exchange is done in XMPP is very insecure.

We have OMEMO now, key exchange is paranoia-level secure.

Re: XMPP: The secure communication protocol that respects privacy

#10
post #3
post #2

Hi! Glad to see XMPP on the HN first page this morning :) I'm working on a social-network and IM web platform (for 12 years already!), fully built on XMPP https://movim.eu/ . Thanks to its extensibility and the PubSub XMPP standard (see https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html ) you can easily build social-network like features. The standard is pretty simple, it's Atom 1.0 transport within PubSub (see https://xmpp.o…

I've seen movim around but I have never actually tried it. This post gave me the push. So thank you for that. I do have a question though: On https://mov.im/?login it says: "Login using any XMPP account or create a new one" But it only shows me a login form where I can enter my xmpp address and a password. This signals to me that I can log into my existing non-movim-xmpp account, but I have to enter my password on th…

Movim is a social-oriented XMPP client, so yes, it needs to log in to your account. You don't have to use the mov.im instance - in an ideal world your own server can run a copy of Movim, but you can also self-host, or even run it locally on your system.

This year I'm also going to be working on account access delegation for XMPP as part of a funded project, resulting in implementation in Prosody (server software) and publishing/updating related standards. That's the kind of thing Movim would be able to take advantage of so you can grant (restricted) account access to a remote Movim instance without sharing your password.

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