Re: [GNU/consensus] [SH] Re: GNU Consensus Manifesto -- Comments

[Michael Rogers]

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On 11/01/13 14:17, Mikael Nordfeldth wrote:
> Hm, I guess I could read up on this, but how is somethig like a
> group chat constructed if none of the participants have no
> knowledge of who is who in a non-local namespace?

The participants in a discussion group can't relate the pseudonyms
used in the group to personal identities, and that's intentional - "in
a discussion group, nobody knows you're a dog".

The reason that's desirable is that any participant in a group can
invite other participants to join the group, who may not be trusted by
all the existing participants. So participants in group discussions
can either use pseudonyms or remain anonymous.

Of course, if you don't mind being identified, your pseudonym can be
your real name.

> (I think OTR folks is struggling incredibly hard with getting this
> to work somewhat properly?)

Multi-party OTR has a different goal - participants in a group chat
should be able to prove who's taking part, until the chat ends, when
nobody should be able to prove who took part. As you say, hard. :-)

> Yes, the ideas may perhaps be well suited for, say, private
> messaging parts of a protocol. When not even the servers should
> know contents of messages or relations between contacts.

Pond (https://github.com/agl/pond) has an interesting technique based
on group signatures for concealing the relations between contacts from
servers. We haven't yet worked out the corresponding part of the Briar
protocol, but there might be some ideas in Pond that we could use.

Cheers,
Michael
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