My encryption article is READY. look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair: https://blog.soykaf.com/post/encryption/

@lain Finally got a chance to read this, and I think your conclusion about device->device encryption sounds like a great idea. Obviously we want to have our cake and eat it too (and a system like Matrix makes us believe we're doing that) but it's indeed better to expose how the system actually works to users. That seems like good design.

One question not yet answered is how this will work with the existing ChatMessages system. There's currently one chat for each user. Would E2EE require us to have a separate chat for each device?

I imagine this could be consolidated on the frontend for a streamlined UI, but I'm curious how it would work on the backend and with federation.

@alex AP-wise, each user would have a collection of devices. When you send an encrypted ChatMessage, you don't address it to the user, you address it directly to one of their devices, which are AP actors too. This makes federation straightforward. How to make all this obvious on the frontend is the bigger problem, I think.

@lain Ahh I see, this makes it more clear to me how it works on the backend. As I understand it, there's still no concept of "rooms", just "messages" and "devices".

Here's a basic mockup of a way I could imagine. From the user's standpoint it still works like one chat, but it has a placeholder where encrypted messages are. This is an example of chatting between my laptop and your phone, where messages between our other devices are hidden.

@lain Not that I would ever send an Elixir question to your phone, but you get the point.

@lain Ah fuck, I still need a way to switch which if your devices I'm targeting, hold on.