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wesley | 11 years ago

What happens to group chats? as far as I know encrypted group chat is still not supported yet?

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MattJ100|11 years ago

It's possible to achieve quite secure group chats in XMPP, as long as you have a server that you trust (emphasis on that last part). You're probably talking about OTR though, which is quite tricky for multi-party situations.

This isn't XMPP's or OTR's fault - from a high level to have a secure multi-party discussion, every participant must individually verify every other participant. This creates a lot of overhead with large groups. What you can do instead is to delegate your trust to, say, a key member of the group - if they trust every member, so do you. This is the model that XMPP supports. Set up a server that only accepts encrypted and securely-authenticated connections (using whichever mechanism you have the most faith in) and only grant access to the room to trusted individuals.

drdaeman|11 years ago

I had heard TextSecure/WhisperPush (which uses OTR-like protocol with similar properties) has multiparty/group secure conversations. However I'm unaware of any attempts to apply those to XMPP MUCs, neither I've seen any vetted solution for end-to-end encrypted MUCs.

daveid|11 years ago

That's only for end-to-end encryption, say, OTR. What this is about is connection encryption client-to-server and server-to-server.

pgeorgi|11 years ago

That's only for transport level security - messages can still be sent in the clear within the encrypted connection.