Comment on Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances - fiona fokus
Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 week agoI wouldn’t consider it a hack, as the protocol was actually made with these posts in mind. Public posts weren’t the focus of activitypub.
I would consider it similar to email, should we abandon it (yes, but not because of this) just because a malicious email server started publishing all the emails it recieved? AP is just email but social media.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
Yes, and people implemented PGP for encrypted email, and also made SMTP over TLS the standard, so that they wouldn’t have to demand that every router and every SMTP server everywhere on the internet agree not to republish or store secret information that was passing through it, because it started to become understood that email was in no way private.
A proper standard for private posts would be similar. You could have all private posts be encrypted with a rotating key, for example, and have them decrypted by anyone who had the key, on the client side, and stored and transmitted in encrypted form. Being approved to follow the private posts would involve your user being given a copy of the key through some kind of private key exchange. It sounds complex (and it would be, a little), and it would involve moving to the client some of the key management that currently happens on the instance server (and thus undoes some of the actually good design of ActivityPub, by just putting the instance software back in the position of keeping every actor’s keys for them and doing all the crypto work on behalf of the users). Anyway, it would be work and involve some redesign. I’m not saying that’s what they should have done. I’m saying that’s what having private posts as a feature would mean. Anything else is non-private posts that are pretending to be private posts.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Posts should be encrypted, this is what diaspora does. I agree with this. For emails though, pgp is used by no-one. Also, AP uses tls as well.
I was thinking that encrypted posts could work with multi key encryption (if my understanding of this post is correct stackoverflow.com/…/encryption-decryption-with-mu… ).
The problem (imo) is mastodon being the internet explorer of the fediverse, and refusing to do any encryption.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
Yeah. One of the very few design feature of AP that I like is that actors have their very own keys, which means that in theory you could have the keys stay in the browser unlocked by a passphrase or something, and make it so no one could forge a message by a user except that user.
It would be pretty easy to extend that, so that Lemmy DMs get encrypted with the key of the actor meant to receive them, private posts get multi-encrypted with the public keys of any approved followers, et cetera. But yeah it seems like the amount of attention this stuff gets is very minimal.
Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 week ago
That would also key in (no pun intended) with the nomadic identity FEPs.