[messaging] Asynchronous Ratcheting Tree

[Ximin Luo]

I was just forwarded this: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/666

On Ends-to-Ends Encryption: Asynchronous Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees, by Katriel Cohn-Gordon and Cas Cremers and Luke Garratt and Jon Millican and Kevin Milner

It looks very nice. However, on a quick glance through the paper, it doesn't define a way to merge operations performed on the DH group tree. That seems to constrain the group chat to rely on some external mechanism to ensure that operations on the ratchet are performed (by everyone) in a linear order - i.e. it would still have to operate synchronously.

(This constraint is fulfilled trivially in a two-party ratchet because each sender always sends in a linear order, wrt the other recipient.)

I wonder if it's possible to define a merge operation on the DH group tree, so that e.g. Bob and Carol can advance the ratchet independently of each other (e.g. to B and C, each from state O) such that when Alice receives B and C, she can construct the merged ratchet state X that combines both changes (O to A) and (O to B)?

Alternatively, an explicit merge algorithm is not necessary if it can be proved that applying O->A and O->B on top of O is commutative.

X

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