Re: https://mastodon.social/@rusty__shackleford/116403857501332629

I'll just have to graffiti Wikipedia myself.

We're (Mastodon, Bonfire, and Emissary) not doing this from scratch. It's building on MLS, which is an open standard for end-to-end encrypted messages that is used by many big players in tech.

Plus, all of this is open source (mine is here: https://github.com/EmissarySocial/conversations-mls) so hopefully any theoretical back doors would be found by interested parties.

If you're interesting in auditing some code, I'd *love* for you to participate!

In a green field design, you can encrypt almost all metadata, and make the rest sufficiently anonymized.

Sadly, that isn't going to integrate well with AP.

Ah, well.

In the announcement Mastodon team credits SWF for work on E2EE, not the people doing actual research. That's part of the deal.

since it is being funded by the German government, will it have backdoors for specific German priorities?

Yes.

My understanding of MLS is that there is a fair amount of metadata that's public in general. So, group ids, and members of each group are more or less in plaintext, regardless of the transport.

So, it's not *perfect* but it's better than just sending everything in plaintext.

Yeah, that's about how I'd have done it in AP. But the result is like encrypted email, metadata is still public.

That's more or less why I stopped looking at AP as a viable transport. But if you need to stay within it, then yes, looks reasonable.

I haven't looked in a lot of detail, obviously.

Here's a screenshot from my laptop this morning. It's a pretty good view of where I am on this project right now with #Emissary. "Please ignore my silly cats"

I've seen Bonfire's work, and they're even further along.

And, I'm not writing the encryption myself. I'm building on top of the *fabulous* ts-mls library by Luka Jacobowitz. He's been super-supportive and even helped me troubleshoot a few things.

I'm pretty sure Bonfire is using OpenMLS, which is equally awesome.

When Mastodon starts working in 2027, a lot of the groundwork will have been laid already.

The primary spec for ActivityPub is here: https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-e2ee/mls

I have a project overview here: https://emissary.dev/e2ee <- this also includes links to the MLS protocol and other implementation resources.

My overview page WAS up to date, but I haven't posted much recently. But I *swear* I'm still making progress.

I'll show off a little of my work at #FediForum - and I'm sure we'll have larger conversations there about #E2EE in general.

Yes. We're launching in June. Mastodon is building in 2027.

It's a whole new Fedi.

Uh.

Well that explains why my google searches looked so weird.

Yes, I'm old. You kids with your funny words...

#Mastodon was the artillery, the big guns that made the difference. #Bonfire and #Emissary were the special forces recon teams that made it possible.

The good news about this is that it brings this feature to the network we're already using. No change in behavior.. one day, your messages just become a little more private.