Comment by impossiblefork
2 days ago
Yeah, but it is possible to make distributed systems.
I've written up a little toy in Erlang where you have lots of connections to peers and send dummy messages, all of the same size, to all your peers continuously and then, because of this, you can obviously send a message to whoever you like without anyone being able to know to whom you sent it. With a bit of extra delay you can add retransmission, and then you can have huge networks. Complete resistance to traffic analysis.
The only thing you need to accept to have this kind of security is to accept that message timing might be 1/s, or 0.1/s, but for things like e-mail that isn't a problem at all.
My system is not done. I had intended to finish it if ChatControl 2.0 passed, but since it didn't, and there's upon that a war on I didn't put it out, and I thought it was a bad idea to popularize this kind of thing since there was a war on, but it's quite straightforward. Many here could probably write something like it.
There are plenty of P2P and anonymous collaboration tools out there, but the problem for these groups is that members will use insecure tools unless they are as convenient and capable as what they are used to. This is the same reason that the government constantly screws up its own opsec. Nontechnical people in any group are a serious problem for maintaining security.
(This is also why law enforcement concerns about encryption are overblown.)
Yes, but then you have to accept that they can't be part of a group that needs security.
If they aren't willing to do things correctly, not be lazy etc., and you tell them that this means that adversaries will be able to pinpoint them, and pinpoint you and everybody else, and they don't express that they're going to take the effort to be reasonable, then maybe you shouldn't talk to them.
True. If you look at the average person who gets involved in radical politics, many often have issues sticking to a strict security regime. I think this may be why “black bloc” groups and the like are normally smaller splinter groups within the larger movement. Garden variety protestors, activists, and local organizers are probably fine using something like Signal.
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Doesn't that scale up terribly? If everyone has 100 friends and is constantly pinging them every second, you're just flooding the internet with junk.
Yes, but it's fine.
If you receive 10,000 messages per second, that's nothing. That means that you can have 10,000 people online simultaneously with 1 message per second and 100,000 people online simultaneously with 1 message every ten seconds even in the version where there is no retransmission.