Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

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They really bury the detail IMO after the banner claim front and centre on the website (I guess because it's hard/awkward to explain without it sounding just like a difference in nomenclature).

What makes it work afaict is the combination of:

- there are still queue (inbox) IDs

- key (and (just initial?) queue ID) exchange out of band

https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplexmq/blob/stable/protoc...

So messages are still delivered to an identifier, it's just that every user has tonnes of identifiers (per contact/group), there's no server tracking and handling their exchange, and possibly they rotate via encrypted messages once established anyway.

Exchanging out of band gets you the secrecy, and having one per-chat protects you from a contact turning out bad/leaking/compromised - it's fine that they have metadata about their own chat with you, because they have that & the plaintext anyway.

You are missing a crucial aspect of this. There is no identifier. Only a connection.

An identifier is something that relates to more than one thing. A connection is its two endpoints. It is those ends.

Who is at each end is unknown and cannot be known without resorting to grabbing all users devices.

That isn't what GP is saying. In order to effectively use the chat, you are going to tag that connection identifier with a name like Joe on your endpoint device, so that when a message comes in you remember this was the conversation with Joe. The server may not know that this is you and Joe, but you do.

Yeah, that was my take. The issue with end to end encryption is the ends. The ends are the weak link. I think though that simplex may be the best option in this regard though. The user has to know who they are speaking with, but here the user can choose not to tag the connection, and therefore take on the mental load of remembering which connection identifier referred to which person.

Having not used this chat I don't know how easy thing might be but I do remember, before mobile phones were a thing, being able to remember at least 8 phone numbers that I used to call regularly. Certainly if it called for it you could do this with simplex?

Or you could tag it "Fox Terrier" and only you know why you gave your friend Juan that name.

'queue ID' is their own term in doc I linked.

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