Introducing socialist millionaire verification to ease fingerprint verification does not seem a bad idea.
Oh no it’s a pretty good idea, and unfortunately mosibo isn’t the first project to implement it… in an entirely new protocol that nobody will ever adopt. Implementing SMP in a widely-used protocol (email/PGP, IRC/OTR, XMPP/OMEMO) would benefit a lot more users.
Using phone numbers as identifiers is a well-known Signal flaw.
Indeed, but once again we have dozens of protocols providing messaging primitives, whether federated or centralized. Why should we even consider Signal or Mesibo? To be honest, i appreciated Mosibo’s criticism of Signal: it’s fair and strongly deserved. I would add to this that Signal dropped on-disk database encryption which is horrible: users set a passphrase expecting some security… only to find out later that the passphrase is purely cosmetic and the local DB is unencrypted.
I am just trying to understand how this criticism of Signal would be invalid, or FUD.
I don’t think it’s either FUD or invalid. It just looks like yet another corporation making yet another protocol for yet the same usecases we already have a dozen protocols for. If mesibo is only about cryptographic research, OMEMO/MegOLM could use a refresher… but unfortunately they’re promoting an entire ecosystem and it’s really not clear what the technical/business model is (i found the code for libmesibo but i don’t see any server implementation on their github).
I think given the very fragmented ecosystem we already have, the burden is on them to prove that their project is interesting/useful. From my perspective, it looks like some cryptographers wanted to do cool stuff, but need a bullshit business front (like any startup) to operate… like a lot of crypto research, unfortunately…
Oh no it’s a pretty good idea, and unfortunately mosibo isn’t the first project to implement it… in an entirely new protocol that nobody will ever adopt. Implementing SMP in a widely-used protocol (email/PGP, IRC/OTR, XMPP/OMEMO) would benefit a lot more users.
Indeed, but once again we have dozens of protocols providing messaging primitives, whether federated or centralized. Why should we even consider Signal or Mesibo? To be honest, i appreciated Mosibo’s criticism of Signal: it’s fair and strongly deserved. I would add to this that Signal dropped on-disk database encryption which is horrible: users set a passphrase expecting some security… only to find out later that the passphrase is purely cosmetic and the local DB is unencrypted.
I don’t think it’s either FUD or invalid. It just looks like yet another corporation making yet another protocol for yet the same usecases we already have a dozen protocols for. If mesibo is only about cryptographic research, OMEMO/MegOLM could use a refresher… but unfortunately they’re promoting an entire ecosystem and it’s really not clear what the technical/business model is (i found the code for libmesibo but i don’t see any server implementation on their github).
I think given the very fragmented ecosystem we already have, the burden is on them to prove that their project is interesting/useful. From my perspective, it looks like some cryptographers wanted to do cool stuff, but need a bullshit business front (like any startup) to operate… like a lot of crypto research, unfortunately…
I agree with all of your points :)