Discussion
@hotelzululima @david_chisnall @soatok
Ok. How about: I'm not qualified to build national security level encryption and I'd love to have help from someone like you to make it better.
I've built a very good proof of concept messenger that I plan to keep improving. The source code is here: https://github.com/EmissarySocial/conversations-mls
And I'm been trying to get help to do a formal security review. But that's harder to get done.
Everything is open source. Please help us make it better.
@benpate Honestly the hardest part isn't the crypto primitives — it's the key management and the server knowing as little as possible. We went down the same road and ended up with per-thread keys on the client, server never sees plaintext. Happy to compare notes — our architecture page documents everything we chose and why: https://tryveil.app/architecture
Agreed 👍🏻
And fortunately for me, most of that legwork was already done by the [real cryptographers] who designed MLS, and ts-mls, the encryption library that implements it.
Still, there's *tons* of security work still to do - even for the low bar of protecting from snoopy admins.
I'd love to chat about your work. The VEIL website looks really impressive. Do you have a demo app I can dig into?
@benpate MLS is a great foundation — the protocol-level key agreement saves a ton of work. Our approach diverges on key management: we generate per-thread ephemeral keys client-side so the server never has a decrypt key, even for push notifications. Demo app is on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/MYn1gVjU — happy to talk architecture tradeoffs.
@veil_im Thank you! I'll try to join your test flight.
And for sure, there are tons of trade-offs with MLS -- especially in a distributed environment. We're still wrestling with one of the biggest: group membership metadata and message delivery. And that may never be solved in a way that makes everyone happy.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@benpate Thanks Ben! TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/MYn1gVjU — would love your eyes on it. You're spot on re MLS group membership metadata — that exact problem is what drove us to design VEIL around identity-based keypairs with no group membership graph at all. No membership list, no metadata, nothing to leak. Happy to dig deeper if you're curious.