Important progress has been made regarding bringing MLS end-to-end encryption to the ActivityPub protocol, with developers already building implementations and providing feedback to a future version of the protocol spec.
Important progress has been made regarding bringing MLS end-to-end encryption to the ActivityPub protocol, with developers already building implementations and providing feedback to a future version of the protocol spec.
Why?
What benefit does this have over Signal/Matrix?
The article just says “improvements”.
why? because it would be cool if only intended recipients are able to view sent messages.
That’s not really going to be the case if you’re using a website instead of an audited app like signal/matrix.
that argument doesn’t hold. you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good-and if you truly believe that, then you wouldn’t be recommending Matrix which has web clients, see https://app.element.io/
Any we client including Matrix webclient is incredibly vulnerable to the server just injecting JS and reading your messages.
Like there is no point of E2E encryption in Twitter, Musk can read your messages if you open them on any device he can execute arbitrary code on.
That doesn’t preclude fediverse clients from enabling E2EE. A web-client isn’t a requirement.
Agreed, nobody should trust twitter, but I would trust most mastodon clients to send encrypted messages, if/when implemented correctly. Does it guarantee that messages will never be read? No, but it does an extra layer that wasn’t there before.
So, I used messaging here in the broad sense. One possible application for it is instant messaging, which there are ActivityPub implementations out there doing that. But it can also be used for statuses or pretty much anything else that gets federated.
That actually sounds cool, I wonder if they could support Hidden containers, so the same message can be decypted to different messages by different users.
One benefit is that Signal controls all the infrastructure and some people do not like that. Sure, you could also spin up a Matrix home server, but that isn’t an ideal solution for everyone either. Some people want to do messaging via their existing ActivityPub infrastructure and that’s OK.
from what i can tell, mls supports much larger group chats (50k users) whereas i assume signal would struggle.
my chat of 10 people i signal seems just as secure, if i am reading right.