Even harder problem is getting the average user to care about things like end-to-end encryption. Let alone getting them to pay for it. Thats why services like Signal are not in the majority.

Give it a decade or two. The increasing amount of things we store digitally and the risk of exposure or losing them rises day by day, with it the amount of people who were credit scammed, crypto stolen, bully sharing explicit images etc, not speaking of scandals like Meta had. Not long ago people didn't care about their home being energy efficient either.

A non-free messenger app seems pretty challenging because

* there’s lots of free competition, including Signal, which is free and decent.

* you’d probably need to open source it if you want to convince anyone it was trustworthy

* what if you want to message somebody that doesn’t want to pay?

Of course maybe a huge company could work this out… but it seems fundamentally very hard

The everything encrypted is a hard one, but should be doable so long as the incentives are right. For example, the money needs to be paid by the users for the product, and to keep it fully encrypted. It needs to be clear that not only is there no incentive to sell data or mine for ads, but doing so is a disincentive because it would actually lead to customer loss.

If I could raise enough money to replace my dayjob, I would totally do this. I'm guessing it's not doable, but I put together a quick Google Form to gauge interest. If anyone would be interested, please submit the form[1]

[1] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe1sl5MI1Mxna6RBTXB...

Doesn't Signal do all of this, minus the profit?

> Maybe charge people to use the app?

Who will pay for a service that's offered for free by at least 3 major messaging apps?

I'm not aware how to anonymously use Signal in any meaningful way but there might be some way.

Anonymity isn't necessary. e.g. Briar isn't anonymous (you still need to trust your contacts), but it's essentially impossible for third-parties to track who is talking to who and when.

Use it via a VPN and with a telephone number that is not associated with your identity.

This is what I do.

That's pseudonymity, not anonymity.

Signal doesn't allow creating multiple identities for different contexts (without using multiple phones).

And depending on your personal risk profile (e.g. journalists protecting their sources), phone numbers are extremely difficult to acquire anonymously in many countries. In most EU countries, you need to show photo ID to register prepaid SIM cards these days.

You don’t need to acquire a phone number from the country you’re in. Any phone number works on Signal. There’s no long distance.

In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number via the internet that works fine on Signal. There is no requirement that the SIM card in your phone be the number you use to register on Signal, or that the number even be a GSM number.

My Signal number is a Google Voice number, for example. Anyone with access to a US GSM number can create these; many are for sale for anonymous payment methods.

It’s easy to use Signal anonymously in any country that has mostly uncensored internet.

> In EU countries you can easily and anonymously get a US number that works fine on Signal.

How? And even if that's feasible (for many people I'd argue it's too big a hurdle) it still only gets you pseudonymity.

There are some interesting encrypted messaging ideas floating around that allow you to have per-contact or even per-conversation keys or multiple identities for different contexts; Signal is just not doing much in that regard.

It is completely anonymous, there is no link from the telephone number used to register to the person using it.

Yes, but you only have one number/identifier that links you across all contexts. That’s a pseudonym, which is a different thing from being anonymous.

You’d need multiple phones and a phone number per context to be actually anonymous. That’s just not practicable for many people, I’d say.

If I would have to be anonymous then I won’t even bother with any phone number. In fact I won’t even bother with Signal or WhatsApp. I’ll find an app or service that is e2ee and doesn’t require a phone number at all.

Because what’s even the general use case of using Signal and WhatsApp (in their current forms)?

Because then it would just be weird talking to friends and family. And with those few people you want to be totally anonymous with? Those apps and services which are already anonymous.

Will be awesome if Signal adds that feature? Yes. But even then I would still ise dedicated anonymous apps.

Switch to using Session instead.

I pay for Signal. I used to pay for WhatsApp, before it was acquired. Not many users are like me, granted.

The #1 thing that sounds impossible is how do tie a payment to an account anonymously? Unless you only take anonymous payments, you end up putting a credit card number on every account.

>No one other than the people in the conversation can know who is talking to who and when.

This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages.

> This also means the infrastructure cannot block messages. Or tell the difference between spam and legit messages. Effectively you can DDoS a client with messages.

Not necessarily. Eg as a simple model, assume that you 'send' a message by publishing it to something like a usenet group (and perhaps that group charges you a fraction of a cent for doing so).

There's no denial-of-service for a client that receives a lot of messages, distributed or otherwise, but still outsider don't see who is sending what to whom.

Who wants this? All the effort and few thousand users paying 20 USD / year doesn't make much profit. The world is happy with the encryption WhatsApp provides and would have been happy even if that wasn't there.

Also iMessages. 135M users in the US.

It also isn't really encrypted. The really juicy bits (metadata) is available for Apple to read as it sees fit.

I'd love something like the Matrix [0] data model (JSON messages aggregated in an eventually-consistent chatroom CRDT) transmitted over something like simplex for metadata resistance.

[0] https://matrix.org [1] https://simplex.chat/

It's not possible to have a "web scale" that end-to-end encrypts metadata, because part of the metadata is understanding the recipient.

If the network or server has no idea where to deliver an encrypted message, then the only way to guarantee delivery is to send all the messages to all the users to unpack to see which ones are relevant to them, which fails "web scale"

What if all inboxes were public, but only decryptable by the recipient? Recipient can then poll for new messages.

Only the recipient would be able receive/send messages from that inbox. So you can easily match inbox to the recipient.

You wouldn't send via your inbox. And anyone would be able to download any inbox, the data would just be useless without the key.

There might be problems with the proposed model, but they aren't the problems you suggested.

(As an individual, you wouldn't want to download just your own inbox. But to obfuscate, you can download a random subset of inboxes that often-enough includes your own.)

And that's not something I want to have to do: download random inboxes on a limited phone data plan. As a polled service, how many times do you have a poll a minute? If I'm instant messaging, I could be pulling multiple times a seconds. How many more inboxes would I have to poll at the same time to obfuscate my actual inbox?

And if you want to be anonymous you can't filter by the last message you've received, so every time you pull your inbox, you're getting the last X time in messages. So if I have multiple active group chats, that would really start to add up.

Videos and images like every other messaging service would have to be anonymized the same way. Even 10x noise polling for a 10MB video would be too much data on phones and probably not enough to anonymous. How about obfuscating the sender? Would a sender be uploading 10x trash, not just text but also video, messages in every inbox?

If you have such a limited data plan, perhaps you shouldn't communicate with videos?

Even if I don't, any inbox chosen to randomly download could have videos.

Good point. Though you can probably use 'blocks' (think like hard-disk blocks) instead of complete mail boxes. You download random blocks that also contain blocks from your mailbox.

You can't just download random blocks until you get your data though, you might never download some blocks. So you need some kind of index of blocks. And your client can't generate that because the server stores all the data. So it's a server-sided index.

If you only download the index for specific users, that's no different than an inbox: if you pull the index for an inbox and don't pull all the associated blocks (including videos), that's obviously not your box.

The other alternative is downloading the entire index for every single block, which sounds even worse than just downloading random complete inboxes with videos. Especially if the blocks are going to be filled with trash inboxes filled with trash data to obfuscate the sender. Even my own blocks would get trash data including videos that I have to download to pretend it's real.

Fountain codes and other tricks might help.

Ie any block could be useful for multiple inboxes and messages. See also how freenet used to do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

Freenet, as a distributed data store, just makes the issue worse. Now I'm expected to host images and videos that other people send. Also a distributed data store doesn't free you from downloading random inboxes either. Someone just needs to to be running enough instances to be able to track and identify you if you're only downloading your inbox.

That's why Tor makes you bounce between multiple nodes, to decrease the chance you get only nodes that belong to a tracker. Actually not sure why I didn't think of Tor as something that already fulfills all those anonymous requirements. It's also an example of the drawbacks of being completely anonymous, that network is extremely slow and will definitely not scale to anything mainstream.

This is very hard to get right.

Some Bitcoin SPV clients have tried solving an almost equivalent problem, but the obvious approach does not work for various subtle reasons: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/763.pdf

Oh, it's definitely not easy to get this right properly. I just wanted to point out that things aren't as clear-cut impossible as the comment suggested.

Y'all are struggling so hard to describe newsgroups :)

Check out alt.cryptography (I think) if you can.

How would the servers know where to route the poll requests without metadata? They wouldn't.

Briar gets most of the way. And Cwtch gets all the way (except maybe the pay the people working on it).

Any sort of project that actively tries to minimize data collection will not be profitable. At least not in this current economic system. They will have to be non-profit (Signal, etc), or run by volunteers (Cwtch, Briar).

It seems really straightforward to suggest that the better way to solve this is with standard protocols and self-hosting, but I do realise that's quite hand wavy and often not very accessible.

SMTP is an example of this succeeding, as problematic as that protocol is.

> Veilid is a peer-to-peer network and application framework released by the Cult of the Dead Cow on August 11, 2023, at DEF CON 31. Described by its authors as "like Tor, but for apps", it is written in Rust, and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and in-browser WASM. VeilidChat is a secure messaging application built on Veilid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veilid

> Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first, networked application framework.

> The framework is conceptually similar to IPFS and Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services over a privately routed network.

> The framework enables development of fully-distributed applications without a 'blockchain' or a 'transactional layer' at their base.

> The framework can be included as part of user-facing applications or run as a 'headless node' for power users who wish to help build the network.

https://veilid.com/

https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid

https://veilid.com/discord

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kb1lKscAMDQ

> VeilidChat is a chat application written for the Veilid distributed application platform. It has a familiar and simple interface and is designed for private, and secure person-to-person communications.

https://veilid.com/chat/

https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat

Previously:

Veilid is an open-source, P2P, mobile-first, networked application framework

180 points 4 months ago 71 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37118124

Cult of the Dead Cow wants to save internet privacy with new encryption protocol

141 points 4 months ago 79 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018404

https://gizmodo.com/cult-of-the-dead-cow-launches-veilid-enc...

It may not check all of your boxes, but the waku protocol and applications’ use of it have been evolving since 2018:

https://waku.org/

https://github.com/waku-org/nwaku

Two projects that are trying:

https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat

https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android

This is doable and has been done. Briar is an example. The Tor network is used for transport and there is no central server. Even the clients don't know who is talking to who, everything is done in terms of the crytographic identity number. That means that even the users don't for sure know who they are talking to; as part of the introduction to someone you have to give the name you will know them by.

The Briar way of doing things actually solves an important E2EE usability issue. Since the cryptographic identity is the only identity, it is much harder for the user to end up using the system without a verified identity.