👉 RFC: Encrypted Feeds and Twt Signatures 👈
Please comment here or there 🙏
cc @xuu@txt.sour.is who helped to come up with the details 🙇♂️
Simple answer: no, don’t do it. For the uses cases use something else instead of adding complexity to twtxt
@darch@twtxt.net I don’t agree. This doesn’t any further complexity to Twtxt the spec – It is a completely optional feature. Folks in the distance past used to experiment with (and there’s at least one feed) using GPG/PGP. The problem is (as always) it wasn’t spec’d out (at all) and adoption was basically non-existent.
What @xuu@txt.sour.is and I are proposing here and @david@netbros.com has toyed with this idea with me, is a way to do encryption and signatures per-Twt in a feed and publish your “public key” in your feed. The spec itself remains unchanged.
In order words, to dumb clients like cat (reading the feed raw) or legacy/unmaintained clients like twtxt (the so-called reference client?) would basically just ass the example I posted in the issue. BEGIN SALTPACK MESSAGE ....
Don’t worry Pixel Blog doesn’t have to implement this at all 😂 – In fact if you read my proposal carefully, it is very clear on how clients can basically ignore “encrypted” Twts if they don’t support it, or ignore encrypted Twts obviously not meant for them (because decryption fails).
@prologic@twtxt.net to be fair I did not read the spec and I hadn’t had my coffee yet😴You are of couse as aways free to build what you like. I just see twtxt/yarn/pixelblog as a way for open broadcasting. Private communication would be better of using separate technology. I just rather see a working search and filtering feature build into yarn or as a separate service than adding features that is in my opinion out of scope for twtxt.
@darch@twtxt.net That’s okay 🤗 – But try not to think of this as a “private messaging”, that’s not actually the use-case. The use-case is as simple as this:
My family and I were out at a local museum one weekend and we took some family pictures we wanted to share with our extended family. We had no way of doing this. But my old man @off_grid_living@twtxt.net is on Yarn.socail, as is his wife, as well as my sister, my wife’s sister and a few other close friends/family. It made sense at the time to think about a way to just post the images on our Yarn.social account but only targeting specific folks.
This is the primary use-case and one that I fully expect to become more common
as the whole point of (in my opinion) be being able to share things online
in both public and private is to do so easily.
I think the capability and choice should be there.
I should be able to throw an image up of my kids in a “Private Feed”
and being rest assured that only a certain subset of folks can actually view this.
That’s the point. 🤗
@prologic@twtxt.net as a fan of encryption and privacy, I think signing and encrypting messages are not only desirable but needed, I’d like to see it in action. The downside, as some have discussed is the UX pains for those clients not supporting the extension.
On the other hand, Saltpack or PGP are great for messaging/email, I understand twtxt is not for that. In a similar way, Twitter allows private messaging in the same App, but in a different section. Same with most Social Services.
I see a use case for signing messages. It could be like the Twitter verification for public messages.
For encryption, as in only a few users can decrypt the message, I can’t see it. Like “Sharing personal information with friends”, why do you want to do that on a public channel? Use a private messaging system, or the section inside the service you use.
To clarify, I was thinking before (and even discussed in TextoPlano but it had no traction) on a public channel where you store messages that anyone can read, but only a person with the private key can decrypt.
I think the concept is cool, even if I’ve read the security advice from Signal, Session and other IM services, about things I was forgetting on security and strong encryption. Here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1013.pdf
With that said, I don’t see how twtxt could be a good place for that kind of encrypted messages. Am I missing something?