this. nostr is just bad for private stuff. nostr DMs were a mistake. We can do better and leverage protocols more suited to private comms to protect peoples privacy at a level that would piss off the NSA.
jeff's avatar jeff
Nostr was designed for public stuff. I think it makes sense to leverage other protocols to add private comms in clients. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
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Can we just like advertise a signal link on our profiles or something? Idk how that works lol
SimpleX recommends sharing the connection string out of band, so nostr would be good for that
I love your style! That would be amazing but I just think our government will never go for it unless there was a law set for them. It’s a nice dream for sure.
palladion's avatar
palladion 2 years ago
My2sats: NOSTR for some kind of public key distribution with built in social verification and then transition over to holepunch (used by keet) to do direct p2p messaging.
Politech87's avatar
Politech87 2 years ago
The NSA is laughing... They can get everything quite easily..
a friend told me to just use the Sessions app but i’m definitely curious about SimpleX as Jack knows a thing or two about privacy and technology. will try both and would love to hear any opinions if someone’s tried both
When an event is posted to relays. Anyone that operates the relay or can read from the relay can receive those events and make determinations noted, even though they can't decrypt the contents. Think of the DM as the letter inside an envelope that is addressed to received, has a sender, postage stamp is marked. Anyone can see the envelope but can't see the message.
If they could connect direct to each other bypassing nostr or public relays sure. There's some other strategies to consider - participants (A, B) could make new ephemeral keys (Ae, Be) for communicating and exchange that information in a normal direct DM. This still shows correlation between those new key sets, but can obscure who is talking to who if there's enough traffic otherwise. - an initiator (A) could send a DM to an intermediate recipient (I) to facilitate passing ephemeral pubkey (Ae) in nested encrypted messages the intermediary itself can't read. The intermediary is effectively a remailer, forwarding the nested encrypted message from A to B, and B then creates a new key (Be) to initiate message back to (Ae) The intermediary represents a central weakpoint though and if compromised would reveal to the compromiser that A is talking to B, but it's better than it being directly obvious - taking the above this could be chained through multiple remailer intermediaries. That's similar to what things like Tor and SimpleX do, just slower, and the initiator is setting up the path from the beginning. We need to learn from past approaches to remailera in the physical and digital world, and wrapping encrypted messages.
So what is the best practice to securely point someone to a signal phone number? Place a text file or an image to a proton drive with a pasword on it. Send the link to the file and the password in the nostr dm. Erase when download is confirmed by the other side? There may be more ellegant solutions with other messengers (one time links with an expiration) perhaps. Could there be a "cache" in the nostr client (that you could link to in a dm), that would be accessible via a p2p connection for one time to exchange a secret? Is this how a security nightmare looks like? 😎🙈
thnx, yeah simplex is prenew so i’m sure they’ll optimize it to use less juice soon. will download both and do some testing as well