I had a bit of extra time this week to attend a call organized by npub1zuuajd7u3sx8xu92yav9jwxpr839cs0kc3q6t56vd5u9q033xmhsk6c2uc regarding a privacy focused project he's been working on for the last year-or-so. Shout-out to npub1e0z776cpe0gllgktjk54fuzv8pdfxmq6smsmh8xd7t8s7n474n9smk0txy for encouraging me to do so, pushing my somewhat out of my comfort zone in reporting on technical updates.

Also, if you know of or are involved in similar dev calls and would like a report done, please reach out and feel free to share calendar updates.

--npub1f4www6qjx43mckpkjld4apyyr76j3aahprvkduh9gc5xec78ypmsmakqh9 would be awesome to see this talked about on SNL later today, as it seems to be a very important/overlooked project for the future of privacy, nostr and bitcoin broadly.

Anyway, here's the unschooled report--my technical explanations may sometimes be scant, but I've done my best to provide more qualified sources where necessary.

---

Bringing Secure, Confidential Group Chats to Nostr - A Monthly MLS on Nostr Dev Call

Posted originally to Stacker News ~nostr territory

Developers met Tuesday, 3 Jun at 1600UTC at what would be the first of a monthly series of community calls to discuss updates and respond to questions about the implementation of the MLS (Messaging Layer Security) standard over nostr.

npub1klkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qulx3vt, npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn, npub1klkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qulx3vt and npub1zuuajd7u3sx8xu92yav9jwxpr839cs0kc3q6t56vd5u9q033xmhsk6c2uc among others attended and contributed to a discussion about the latter's research and development on implementing a new messaging standard on nostr using MLS.

The call highlighted some of the features of MLS, a relatively new (as of 2023) secure and confidential messaging and group-chat protocol standard. It is modeled to achieve a similar level of security as Signal, prioritizing forward-secrecy and post-compromise security, multi-device compatibility, as well as the ability to scale for large groups.

For those not familiar,

Forward secrecy means that encrypted content in the past remains encrypted even if key material is leaked.
Post compromise security means that leaking key material doesn't allow an attacker to continue to read messages indefinitely into the future. ¹

Developers working on the project indicated that it will be an improvement on current instant-messaging standards commonly used by nostr clients, such as nip17, for a relatively simple implementation.

Those in attendance overall showed enthusiasm to push this project forward and developers interested are being encouraged to fork the the Nostr-MLS Rust Library to begin working it into their stack. Notably, jeffg and Hillebrand are keen to see new contributors work on the project.

Participants had the opportunity to ask technical questions about how the library handles some features as well as how to begin contributing.

Discussion also centered around issues with MLS (such as potential key-package rotation DOS attack vectors and de-syncing) as well as some key concepts for the new messaging standard such as how key-packages are signed by a users nsec and published to key-package inbox relays before being rotated.

Proofs of Concept

White Noise and 0xchat both have implemented MLS on nostr. These are the first to prove that the concept of secure-confidential group messaging is possible over the distributed nostr-relay protocol.

Learn More

jeffg has kept detailed project updates on his nostr account. Notably, the post MLS Over Nostr explains the vision he has for the project and his presentation The Past and Future of Messaging on Nostr (youtube) gives a high-level overview of messaging on nostr and the problems he is working to solve.

Follow npub1zuuajd7u3sx8xu92yav9jwxpr839cs0kc3q6t56vd5u9q033xmhsk6c2uc on your favourite nostr client for call updates.

Link to join.

---

Related:

Telegram Clone (sic) on Nostr: Live Demo by @DarthCoin

White Noise: Secure Messaging Over Nostr by @supratic

Footnotes

1. https://primal.net/jeffg/1719562889267 ↩