Can you translate for us non-tech fam, thanks!
Appreciate your work 🙏
After working on this on and off for 7 days, I've finally finished implementing NIP-44 encryption in Swift for use on Apple platforms! This will replace the unrecommended NIP-04 encryption. Definitely lost a few hairs and gained a few gray ones. 😅 Thanks to nostr:npub1qlk0nqupxmlyxravg0aqscxmcc4q4tq898z6x003rykwwh3npj0syvyayc for reviewing my PR to Nostr SDK for Apple Platforms and thanks to nostr:npub16zsllwrkrwt5emz2805vhjewj6nsjrw0ge0latyrn2jv5gxf5k0q5l92l7 from Nos for pair programming with me when I got stuck.
https://github.com/nostr-sdk/nostr-sdk-ios/pull/138
I’ve submitted a forked copy to the shared nip44 repo. Please review and double-check my work if you’re able to read Swift code. All the test vectors pass, though. nostr:npub10jcnehsxwrjepupvh602pl83up0dh3wv3fqfwv062smygqvpeuwsk03kag nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c
Discussion
The claim is that every time you encrypt a message with NIP-04, it decreases the difficulty for an attacker to determine your private key. I’m not a cryptographer, so I can’t verify the claim. The design and professional cryptography audit of NIP-44 was funded by OpenSats, mitigates that attack vector, and is allegedly a better encryption scheme than NIP-04. It does have known limitations as mentioned in the specification. NIP-04 is unrecommended but it has not yet been replaced in all the other NIPs that use it. The developer community needs to work on moving towards implementing NIP-44 encryption for all encrypted messages, including DMs, while still maintaining backward compatibility with NIP-04 encrypted messages.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/44.md
https://opensats.org/blog/nostr-grants-december-2023#nip-44-cryptography-audit