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Re: "Thoughts on the draft spec"
@mbays Depends on what you find to be a horrible hack - a PGP encrypted message could be sent as text/gemini very simply using a preformatted text block. To me, that's not bad.
2023-05-24 · 8 weeks ago
@satch I almost mentioned that one could just use pgp the same way it's done in regular email. Then I remembered how much pgp sucks.
IMHO end-to-end encryption hasn't been implemented in a genuinely easy way anywhere. It always comes at a price. Clients can try to hide it from users, but it still has costs.
So I guess my question is, what implementation of end-to-end encryption sucks less than PGP? What would that look like for Misfin?
Sending unencrypted messages to a server is usually OK for most people, especially for the purposes of the small web (the target userbase of Misfin). A Misfin client which makes PGP-style encryption easy is totally doable. Once you start introducing multiple devices, e2e will get annoying no matter what protocol is being used.
Any way you encrypt it, the receiver must have the key to decrypt it. So the question becomes, how do you get the key to the receiver without sending it the the server first? It's the proverbial chicken and egg proglem. Pgp may suck, but it at least is a solution. Unless someone has a really actually nice solution I can't see making it a required part of the spec.
Thoughts on the draft spec — Misfin is a nice idea, but I'm worried that it doesn't make sense to replace email with something lacking end-to-end encryption. A server on a multi-user system gets the plaintext of messages to its users. It's fine if you run the server on your own home server, but I guess that wouldn't be the typical configuration. I wonder if it would be feasible to work in a PGP-like mechanism using the same client key as in the client certificate... Some other little thoughts...