The Most Secure Messaging On Earth (Fee Backed Asset)

[monsterer]

How would memo encryption prevent someone with an ability to analyze traffic to see who you're sending messages to? Could your ISP see it? Could anyone see it?

Indeed it does not. I guess my point is that the anonymity features implemented by the blockchain ought to be enough to cover all possibilities. If they're not, then its not true anonymity. You don't need a new protocol for that. Bitshares design needs to be good enough to cover it.

[bytemaster]

Using the "drop box" approach does not solve the "routing" problem unless you use the same drop box over and over.  In which case the problem can be described as:

How do I put information "X" into public mailbox "Y" without anyone knowing I was the one putting the message there. 
A second question is how do I check mailbox "Y" without anyone knowing I am the one checking it.

The solution is for me to put my message in an envelope, then put the envelope inside another envelope, and lastly put that inside yet another envelope.  I then mail the message, the first recipient opens it and "re-mails it", the second recipient does the same. This is how remailing works in the physical world (where it is grey market / illegal).   

The only difference here is that the remailer batches messages and then adds bogus messages into the mix.  This means that second remailer cannot correlate inputs to the source with outputs. 

The final destination for all mail would be the blockchain which is replicated in such a manner that users can check their mail without revealing which mailbox they are looking at.

The challenges posed by this protocol include:
1. How do the remailers get paid?
2. How is payment made in such a way that doesn't compromise the intended goal?
3. How do you verify the remailer doesn't just drop your message after taking payment?
4. What size should every message be, they must all be the same size or patterns can be detected / correlated.

Lastly, and most significantly, how much does this degrade the user experience? If it degrades it much at all then your target audience is greatly reduced. 

In fact, I would argue that BitMessage is already sufficient for this market (with a better UI perhaps).
 

[luckybit]

Why is this better than the memo encryption we have in bitshares right now?

How would memo encryption prevent someone with an ability to analyze traffic to see who you're sending messages to? Could your ISP see it? Could anyone see it?

Memo encryption while I don't have the details on it, if it's just encryption then it's not going to be enough. It's not just important that you're encrypted but more that you're immune to all forms of analysis.  If it's not possible to know who sent or received what then you're far more secure. Alice and Bob would need to be able to communicate in the dead drop method where no one can link Alice to Bob.

And this would also be something which can be a mainstream app which is completely separate from financial services or anything like that. It would be for people who need secure communications and who are willing to pay for privacy through micropayments. In theory perhaps it could be built into websites or be an app on mobile phones, with no link to Bitshares at all but which would still provide fees to the network.

If you know a lot about encrypted memos, your knowledge could be useful to design something far better than that. The goal is to be the "Most Secure Messaging On Earth".  There are a lot of different technologies to review and research such as DTNs (disruption tolerant networking), which can actually integrate into an Internet of Things, so that by paying micropayments to various things your messages can be relayed like how a DTN would do it.

Of course all of this would depend on how much of a budget there is, and if it's a FBA then if it's a very popular feature it would pay for itself and have enough of a budget so that it literally can evolve into the "Most Secure Messaging On Earth".

[monsterer]

Why is this better than the memo encryption we have in bitshares right now?

[fav]

please make it happen! 

[xeroc]

@luckybit you should definitely check out "Linear Random Network Coding" or network coding in general.
This in combination with Shamir Secret Sharing rate-less codes could maybe be extended to an even more powerfull decentralized communications platform ..
I will think more about it

[onceuponatime]

Absolutely!

[ebit]

 

[luckybit]

If enough people think this is a good idea, I would also say, while Vuvuzela is pretty good in that it is statistically secure, the Graphene technology allows for so much more. How can we go far beyond what they did while also making sure it's not too expensive for developers to build?

The goal should be to create the Marketing -> "Most Secure Messaging On Earth" <- Marketing.

And to do that we will have to use a technique of "idea mining".  If you think this idea is good, and you've read the white paper, and you're familiar with cryptography and the academic literature behind secure communications, then you're recruited to improve on the breakthroughs of Vuvuzela with any ideas or breakthroughs you can find.

I'm asking for a crowdsourced research project to use this thread as a home base. This way the best ideas can be in one place for developers if this ever becomes an FBA backed technology.

[luckybit]

This is an idea for review.
@Stan
@bytemaster
@xeroc
@AOnk
@bitacer
@ebit
@Thom
@Soepkip
@fuzzy

A new secure messaging breakthrough just happened allowing for secure communication beyond what Tor is capable of, which is also resistant to timing analysis and MITM type attacks. It's resistant to surveillance even if all of the Internet is being monitored in real time.

Bitshares should be the first to implement this and the fees from using this should go to the people who funded it. I think this feature would be far more popular than Stealth transactions, but also generate a ridiculous amount of fees. It would of course require very small fees but when you want privacy you might be willing to pay a fraction of a cent to a cent per message.

The breakthrough paper is here: https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-vuvuzela.pdf

It's called Vuvuzela. The idea is to take the innovations from it's design to create a Bitshares community exclusive UIA to crowd donation, which can create an app which goes beyond transferring value and which can be a mainstream app.

Less technical explanation:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151207113957.htm
http://news.mit.edu/2015/untraceable-anonymized-communication-guaranteed-1207

As is customary I've attached a poll. The data from the poll will inform the community on the level of demand and on what to do next.