Re: [Mimi] Confirming adoption calls for draft-barnes-mimi-arch and draft-ralston-mimi-protocol

[Brendan McMillion <[e-mail]>]

Providing the same privacy properties as Signal is incredibly difficult.
Nobody is asking mimi to do that. However, the mimi protocol could be a
neutral way for service providers to synchronize messages related to a
given group. Whether a service provider chooses to receive messages in some
exceptionally private way or not, would be the service provider's choice.
But instead the drafts require duplicating state between the encryption
layer and mimi layer, and this presupposes a certain inescapable amount of
metadata leakage.

On Sun, Mar 24, 2024 at 1:49 AM Rohan Mahy <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2024, 02:38 Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
>> Sounds like a classic loss for privacy.
>>
>
> I argue it is the opposite. Today if you want to join a group chat on any
> system other than Signal, the participants surrender much more metadata
> than would be revealed to other providers under the proposed MIMI approach
> with pseudonyms. In addition, the low metadata approaches (using techniques
> such as privacy pass) that Konrad and Raphael are nurturing offer
> substantial improvements to privacy.
> If we publish a specification that requires all providers to provide at
> least Signal-level metadata privacy, it is likely that we will end up with
> neither interoperability nor privacy for the vast majority of users.
> Thanks,
> -rohan
>
>