Sure, but that is just a secret management scheme. You can do that regardless of which encrypted blob server protocol you choose. Now that frost can decrypt files with sharded keys, it's just a matter of time until we get a signer that can coordinate secret sharing between many keys.

Replies (4)

Nuh's avatar
Nuh 8 months ago
You are wrong, but hey, try it and see if you can build an encrypted filesystem on Blossom without changing Blossom and without asking clients to do prohibitively complex work on their side, and while reclaiming storage from previous overwritten state. Sure your needs might be limited that you can come up with ad hoc ways to satisfy them with Blossom only and few extra tricks on top, but you can't solve for the general problem without servers helping. I can write about all the challenges involved in a more coherent manner, but honestly I am not sure anyone cares. So it is one of these things where I have to just build what I want and if people think it is valuable they can help themselves to it. That being said, even without encryption I think I did a very good job while working on Pubky combining WebDav with cryptographic identity and authentication, and people can use that or learn from it if they want. Or not.
Nuh's avatar
Nuh 8 months ago
If i understand correctly encryption and decryption with FROST would be asymmetric.. which is not efficient, it would be fine for sharing the symmetric key... but the hard part isn't encrypting a symmetric key for the target receiver... that the easiest part to be honest. The hard part is when you need to revoke someone access from an entire directory... and now you need to reencrypt everything on write, and you need to share the new keys to all the remaining members and you need to do all of that from an interface that is not any more complicated than Google Drive sharing settings. Then you need to delete all the previous chunks of the filesystem tree to reclaim the storage. And if you have a builtin history system things get even harder as new keys should be able to decrypt old files but not vice versa. I am sorry but these problems need to be solved cohesively otherwise you don't have a platform. Access control is not a plug in on S3, it is inherit and it makes or breaks the platform that became later a standard.
Did you forget I work on health care? Sharing encrypted files, dynamically adding and removing permissions to them is where I spent most of my career. Blossom is fine. Can we do better? Sure. But at what cost? I am not convinced there is any need to make things a lot more complicated just for the sake of sharing permissions to access files. The more complicated these systems get, the worse it is for security and privacy of that data. And usually vendors that are pitching complicated systems are either centralizing things on themselves or finding shady ways to get access to some of the data to sell later (by logging the transport layer, for instance). Yes, a LOT of functionality can be added to these types of things. But I have not seen anyone actually asking for them on Nostr yet. Which means it might just be middle management bloatware.