[messaging] "Short" authentication strings

[Tony Arcieri]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 4:32 AM, Michael Rogers <michael at briarproject.org>
wrote:

> I finally got a chance to watch your SOUPS video, and I wanted to ask
> why you've chosen to stretch a low-entropy string rather than doing
> things ZRTP-style


One takeaway I had from SOUPS was that Trevor Perrin prefers to use the
term "short authentication strings" for a ZRTP-style exchange, which is
fine by me. So let's call this a "password-based" key exchange ;)

Confusion's key exchanges *and* messages are brokered by a high-latency
mixer service such that the either appears to be a ciphertext of the same
length, with the goal of "laundering" key exchanges through other traffic.

Arguably with a point encoding format like Elligator we could do a
ZRTP-style exchange this way and uses SAS-strings to authenticate a D-H
exchange, the handshake messages still appearing indistinguishable from
ciphertexts to an outside observer. Perhaps that would be a better
approach...

-- 
Tony Arcieri
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