Discussion
After a brief skim of the 65 page PDF, it looks like it’s a bag of crypto messaging solutions without a well defined problem it’s addressing…
Nostr seems to be the opposite: Very specific problem & solution is easier for devs to reason about and integrate.
Or so I guess.
it's a replacement for TLS mostly
also, yeah, holy shit after reading through bluesky docs and an implementation holy shit nostr is so tight and unified and clear
Yeah – but I was more wondering about whether it was under active development anymore or if it's abandoned.
i'm not really sure exactly how much you can add to these protocols, they are based on AEAD and replace AES schemes with chacha/salsa style CSPRNGs
i would describe them as the most recent advances in message encryption protocols, the unofficial successor of TLS
if you read some of the stuff by the cryptographer Luke Champine this work has been emerging for some time and it takes time for implementations and the general dispersion of knowledge and acceptance of the idea that these protocols are secure
and speaking of which, if you've ever seen "safecurves" they claim that secp256k1 is relatively insecure
not heard of any issues with its security with bitcoin which is a really big and obvious target if anyone has found an exploit on an elliptic curve that has been asserted to be weak based on flimsy stuff that seems to me like a mistaken association between the R and K curve types, the K curves are completely deterministic, you start with one prime number and the algorithm cannot be altered, as opposed to the one used in P256 which is aka secp256r1
i dunno, it's the stuff of conspiracy theories if you ask me, being how much spookery is involved
anyway, point is that fundamentally noise doesn't do a lot different to AES AEAD and similar related protocols, i was experimenting with using schnorr signatures as the MAC in place of the HMAC more commonly used and using a CTR mode as this allows random seeking where CBC and CFB modes require the whole message, counter mode you can start anywhere if you know the offset and the IV and secret (i'm interested in this because it allows you to do gossip style protocols where you only examine a section of the message to determine if the rest is worth decrypting)