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How do DM's work in Lemmy? How safe are they? (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

e2e encryption is pain in the ass, key generation and exchanging, complex and annoying to do

No, no it's not.

Yes, it's more complex than sending plaintext. But for starters it'd be extremely simple to generate a keypair for every user and publish the public key with their profile. When sending DMs you'd use this public key to encrypt the message.

As for storing the private key you could encrypt it with (a derivative of) the user's password, and store it decrypted possibly just in the user's browser.

This simple measure would prevent simple ways of reading the DMs, though obviously you still need to trust that your instance admins are actually serving you the code they claim they do. But it'd definitely prevent "accidental" misuse.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    As for storing the private key you could encrypt it with (a derivative of) the user’s password

    And now every time a user forgets their password and does password recovery, they lose all their DMs.

    E2EE chat is a difficult problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    I mean you could just store it encrypted in the database for the basics, and for advanced users allow them to back it up.

    There are tons of ways to improve it, but there is definitely way more you can do without much inconvenience to the users. I doubt losing old DMs is a huge issue when you forget your password...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Fediverse adds level of complexity on it, like you mention.

    Malicious Lemmy instance could man-in-the-middle by providing it's public key in behalf of the user in other side. Normally this can be mitigated by CA, but CA doesn't fit very well in decentralized system.

    You could add AES with users own password, but problem is that same malicious instance could also steal users password.

    IMHO false sense of privacy is worst than knowing that stuff is unsecure. Again in my opinion fediverse is comparable to yelling in town square.

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