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indeed, difficult problems abound - but signal or briar style tradeoffs may be acceptable to those looking to make use of encrypted DM type comms.
this comment by @yote_[email protected] in the thread points to at least one early consideration on the issue.
anyone who cares (as you do) knows that e2ee is hard as hell to implement properly, especially when its user facing. lots of traps at every step, but there are possible paths if we define what we want to achieve and make that scope crystal clear to the user. improper / mistaken tool use is often much worse than no tool at all. federation makes tool selection all the more important.
as for me, fediverse e2ee would be an initial channel to establish connections that may lead to other, more suitable channels. confirmed identity of internet strangers (beyond initial key exchange) in this particular venue is less important to me than the ability to pass a few ephemeral, secure messages. in my world, who I send my grandmother's super secret meat sauce recipe to is slightly less important than putting clear text on the wire or into instance storage for anyone to potentially see... forever. everyone has their own requirements and its unlikely that fedi e2ee will satisfy them all.
oo I got pinged when you wrote my name (I think?). Good to know that's how that works. I agree that as it stands we're nowhere close to proper encryption on DMs - we shouldn't even try to be implementing half-measures as a stand-in. I would guess that the best option would be to put a warning above DMs saying "this isn't encrypted, the instance owner can read what you write, if you want encrypted conversation use e.g. Matrix or Signal". I know that there's a slot for a Matrix username on my Lemmy profile, so there might even be some potential for integration there.
On the topic of "everyone has their own requirements", Soatok actually says the following in their article:
Most (all?) of these vulnerabilities have since been fixed, but it goes to show that even a titan like Matrix still cannot be trusted to handle perfect encryption.
It looks like Soatok's proposal has been stalled on their github (probably because they got busy with something else in the meantime).
Not sure if this will ping correctly since their handle is from mastodon but @[email protected] if you care to share any thoughts on this topic (E2EE DMs w/ ActivityPub) since your blog post was referenced. I'm not even close to being good at cryptography so forgive anything stupid I said
Edit: Actually it looks like the language I proposed is already there:
completely agreed wrt your reply. encryption is serious business and I am pretty sure that physicists will eventually discover a fundamental law of the universe already known to mathematicians - "never roll your own".
having said that, we do have examples of state of the art trustless key distribution and encryption frameworks that are believe to be robust. adapting a suitable fedi e2ee framework is likely quite some time away, but I think it is something that should be on the radar and gently agitated for - at least to keep the underlying activitypub protocol agnostic to it during continued buildout.
anyone reading this thread and interested in possible federated e2ee should take a look at the excellent article that you highlighted. it starts a thought process and gives an entry point for contribution and collaboration. again, thanks for sharing, it was a great read.