On 10/10/14 21:21, Ximin Luo wrote:
> On 10/10/14 21:06, Trevor Perrin wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Ximin Luo <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> On 10/10/14 17:09, Trevor Perrin wrote:
>>>>
>>>> In an asynchronous setting you can't assume other parties are online
>>>> to retransmit.  With no central server to retransmit, how does your
>>>> algorithm work?
>>>>
>>>
>>> It works by having everyone be a potential re-sender, of everyone else's 
>>> ciphertext. (Only the ciphertext is cached, not e.g. ratchet secrets 
>>> derived from them.) So yes, it doesn't work if there is one person who is 
>>> never online at the same time as anyone else.
>>>
>>> But in such a case, you would need a server to cache the ciphertext 
>>> *anyway*, for that person to receive *any messages at all*. A non-caching 
>>> server doesn't help reliability, only performance/efficiency - since the 
>>> original sender could have just used separate individual transports 
>>> (without the central server) to deliver to those recipients directly via 
>>> other routes. And once you build the caching server, it's not much effort 
>>> to have it attempt retransmits periodically.
>>
>>
>> It's true that the asynchronous setting requires a message to be
>> stored somewhere, awaiting delivery.
>>
>> But I disagree that it's "not much effort" for this somewhere to
>> retransmit messages to anyone in a group who asks.  That's not how
>> transports like (SMS, Google Cloud Messaging, email, Pond, or mix
>> networks) work.
>>
> 
> Why do you think it's a lot of effort? Those transports don't try to achieve 
> group consistency; why is it unreasonable to suppose that consistency 
> requires changes to (or, enhancements on top of) how the transport works? I 
> have tried to explain why I think this is necessary in the first post, at 
> least under certain constraints, but no-one is addressing that and instead 
> just denying my claims without backing it up.
> 
>> I think your original question was directed at TextSecure.  TextSecure
>> already supports a few different transports, and may need to support
>> more in the future.  So anything we do with "transcript consistency"
>> needs to work within the premise that message delivery is asynchronous
>> and unreliable.
>>
>> Trevor
>>
>> [1] https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000372.html
>>
> 
> This [1] doesn't achieve consistency. I tried to explain why both in its 
> "next message in thread" and in the first post of this thread, but it looks 
> like my warnings are falling on deaf ears; here is a more concrete example:
> 
> A: (1) Who wants ice cream? (last-message-seen: 0)
> A: (2) Who wants to kill the president? (last-message-seen: 1) (sent to 
> everyone, *except B*)

correction, editing made things inconsistent. This should say, sent to everyone 
*except C*.

> B: (3) No thanks... (last-message-seen: 2)
> C: (4) Me! (last-message-seen: 3)
> 
> X
> 

-- 
GPG: 4096R/1318EFAC5FBBDBCE
git://github.com/infinity0/pubkeys.git

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