Signatures are being chained (like a blockchain) to create a provable order -- necessary to avoid split-brain problems in an offline-first environment. The original use case was that one of the devs lived on a sailboat & got internet once every like six months.
On Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 5:46 AM fuzzyTew <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 12:40 AM John Ohno <[email protected]> wrote: > <...> > >> Fully independent implementations are under development, but they're >> difficult because the protocol as defined involves cryptographically >> signing sections of regular JSON -- which, of course, has no defined order >> for objects. This means that in practice, the SSB protocol is not standard >> JSON plus signatures, but the entire set of nodejs JSON serialization >> quirks. In order to implement it in another language, you have to duplicate >> exactly the ordering produced by nodejs, or else old messages will not be >> interpreted as valid by your implementation and the messages produced by >> your implementation will not be interpreted as valid by competing >> implementations. Ultimately, this means that if you want a full-featured >> SSB client, you're stuck with an electron app (with all the attendant bloat >> and memory leaks). >> > > It sounds like the protocol is a little complicated under the hood? > > Do you know why the order of serialized content matters when it is only > being signed and not encrypted? >
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