An essay explaining why we don't plan to use MLS: https://www.poberezkin.com/posts/2025-08-12-mls-the-naked-king-of-end-to-end-encryption.html
A sidenote, is that Nostr's Whitenoise avoids its main problem.
TL;DR: MLS security model is "Trust me bro".
If white noise avoids it, why not use it?
Lol what a shitshow.
โThis essay is purposefully provocative. It has no intention to offend anybodyโ
lol
Tldr on how white noise avoids the "main problem" (AS presumably)?
Here's what chatgpt summarised for me after a bit of back and forth.
Please do screenshots next time, thanks
We don't have an "Authentication service" that issues and verifies a user's identity. We use nostr pubkeys for identity.
I also think that we avoid the "participation privacy" issue that he mentions in the article but want to clarify what he means with him before claiming anything. ๐
large groups should be assumed to be public anyway, MLS is much worse than the signal protocol
It seems the AS is a mapping from some other identity to a pubkey. This is a worry if there is an "other" identity. nostr:nprofile1qqsvnx99ww0sfall7gpv2jtz4ftc9v6wevgdd7g4hh7awkpfvwlezugpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsx06t26 just like nostr already has pubkey identities, so what's the problem.
โthe lack of participation privacy
If you understand that in Keychat ID are decoupled from sending/receiving addresses and addresses are continuously rotated, youโll realize itโs almost impossible for a message relay to identify the participants in a group.
This has the same problem that was drawing criticism with early design of SimpleX network - while there is no persistent/observable identity on the protocol level, there is a fixed transport identity - relays can see which IP addresses communicate with which IP addresses. So it would require a similar solution to what we did with SimpleX network to mitigate it.
As for address rotation, it's currently possible manually, so they are not completely static, and this feature is used a lot, and it will be automatic next year. The challenge with automatic rotation is reduced usability - data backups do not allow restoring connections, so it requires smarter approach to make sure that the solution is usable.
Keychatโs receiving address is updated using the Signal double ratchet, and so far rotating the receiving address has had almost no impact on the stability of message reception.
White Noise and ANY application using nostr for identities can completely ignore this article. It simply doesn't apply, since nostr IS the "Authentication Service" mentioned here.
Yes, the post mentions WhiteNoise
You've established yourself as the secure chat. No refute there.
But you're not usable.
-Notifications are shit.
-No cross device support.
-A sea of technical settings.
-Backups are a disaster.
-Delivery is iffy.
Put the SIMPLE back in SimpleX, and make it as easy to use as Session.
Pre-set all settings, clean the UX, make notifs work, add multi-device support, make backups easy and use a seed phrase to unlock them. Then you will be my go to. Till then, it's Session for me.
Honestly they should make it where if only one device can carry the chat database, then a desktop or server should be the primary device and then a phone or other devices can link to it. Their current solution of linking a mobile to a desktop doesn't really work (at least on iOS) because mobile devices have issues running background processes.
I've never tried Session, and I don't know many people who use SimpleX. I do like SimpleX's idea of no accounts though (Session has accounts).
