On 05/11/2018 10:49 AM, Carsten Mattner wrote: > On 5/11/18, Ola Bini <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Personally, I'm strongly against adding group chat to the core >> protocol - I think if and when a good group chat proposal exists, it >> should be separate. It would add too much complexity, in my point of >> view. > > Group chat has still not been solved in a safe way, so I'd stay clear > of it, as well.
I would also recommend against anticipating group chat support in the libotr-ng API. The current cryptographic protocols for secure group chat have many problems. Nonetheless, based on our current work and my read on the progress of other efforts, it is reasonable to expect one or more good solutions with a common API to appear within the next year. However, our current understanding is that it is not possible to create a simultaneously non-interactive (i.e., suitable for text messaging), authenticated, and deniable group messaging protocol with our current tools. This means that the hypothetical group chat version of libotr-ng (libotr-ng-ng?) will need a significantly different API: either it will need to drop the new non-interactivity support in OTRv4 (dramatically limiting the applications), or deniability (and at that point, why should it be called "off-the-record"?). In either case, designing the current API to anticipate one of these compromises would almost certainly be a mistake for these reasons and also the aforementioned complexity issue. Getting OTRv4 out the door and into users' hands soon is far more important. ~Nik _______________________________________________ OTR-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/mailman/listinfo/otr-dev
