As someone who used to be in the Secure Scuttlebutt community an now works on OpenMLS, I wonder how they (you?) deal with concurrency of Commit messages. I spent quite some time thinking about ways to detect and resolve forks, and the current iteration of MLS doesn't really have good answers here.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/001c516f72943081...
How does White Noise address criticisms surrounding Nostr's implementation[1]:
> While nostr offers the ability to send encrypted DMs to user pubkeys, the metadata of these messages are broadcast publicly via relays. This is the same as a bitcoin transaction being viewable on the public ledger. The contents of the direct message will be encrypted, but other metadata like the sender and recipient can be viewed by anyone.
Even assuming if metadata is encrypted, does WN's implementation broadcast messages across public relays?
If you can map out social networks based on publicly available data, can tell if one user messages another, or correlate when messages were sent to/from whom, I would not call that private.
tl;dr: the answer you're looking for is probably in the explainer doc [1].
At its core, Nostr is simple: it's "just" JSON over WebSockets. But there are dozens of optional proposals to add additional functionality. And a few of those proposals are related to encrypted DMs, specifically, NIP-04 [2], and NIP-17 [3]. Most of the online criticism of encrypted DMs on Nostr is about NIP-04 (which is why it's deprecated.)
White Noise is using a different encryption standard: MLS (Messaging Layer Security) [4]. They explicitly say in their docs: "White Noise is an implementation of the NIP-EE spec." [5]. The NIP-EE proposal itself is on GitHub [6]. The explainer doc [1] I first mentioned is linked to from the proposal [6].
This is all to say: given all the links I posted here, an AI chatbot could probably give you a better answer using the prompt: "How is NIP-EE (Messaging Layer Security for Nostr) different or better than NIP-04 or NIP-17?"
(I'm a little surprised that wasn't already in the FAQ for the project.)
[1]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/001c516f7294308143515a494a35213fc45978df/EE.md
[2]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/04.md
[3]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/17.md
[4]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9420.html
[5]: https://github.com/parres-hq/whitenoise?tab=readme-ov-file#the-spec
[6]: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1427I haven't looked into the White Noise code, but Gift Wrapping is just one way this issue was solved a long time ago: https://nips.nostr.com/59
The then immediate issue is routing becomes very inefficient since every node now needs to receive and attempt to decrypt every single message. Which they solved by having channels to split up the network and only require decrypting of every message on the same channel as your address.
I started my reply thinking it was still using Tauru but apparently things change fast!
firstly: i think the only way secure p2p messaging can work is if its decentralised. no 3rd parties to communication, how this would be done i have no idea. maybe like email but without the server?
secondly: you'd need to ensure a secure os on each end that you can trust to not take screenshots and send to hq before transmission or after reception.
since its not possible to use the internet without a source ip. its almost provably insecure (in terms of privacy), no matter what protocols are dreamed up. a 3rd party will have to be trusted to distribute packets. and thats the weak point. (unless you force the source IP to be 0.0.0.0 or something before it goes out)
couldnt we just use dns to point to recipients, force zero the source ip and send udp packets directly?
what about pgp through a tor relay?
Nostr can run over TOR.
SeriousM•6h ago
shark_laser•2h ago
Run your own fork if you don't trust this one.