specs/standards/application/privatev1.md

title	name	category	tags	editor	contributors
PRIVATE1	Private conversation	Standards Track	an optional list of tags, not standard	Jazz Alyxzander (@Jazzz)

Abstract

Background

Pairwise encrypted messaging channels are a foundational component in building chat systems. They allow for confidential, authenticated payloads to be delivered between two clients. Groupchats an more conversation based communication often rely on pairwise channels (at least partially) to deliver state updates and coordination messages.

Having robust pairwise communication channels allow for 1:1 communication while also providing the infrastructure for more complicated communication.

Private V1

PrivateV1 is conversation type which establishes a full-duplex secure channel between two participants.

Private Conversations have the following properties:

• Payload Confidentiality: Only the participants can read the contents of any message sent.
• Content Integrity: Recipients can detect if the contents were modified by a third party.
• Sender Privacy: Only the recipient can determine who the sender was.
• Forward Secrecy: A compromise in the future does not allow previous messages to be decrypted by a third party.
• Post Compromise Security: Conversations eventually recover from a compromise which occurs today.
• Message Reliablity: Messages sent with this protocol are
• Partial Message Order: !TODO:

Definitions

This document makes use of the shared terminology defined in the CHAT-DEFINITIONS specification.

The terms include:

• Application
• Content
• Participant
• Payload
• Recipient
• Sender

Architecture

This conversation type assumes there is some service or application which wishes to generate and receive encrypted content. It also assumes that some other component will be responsible for delivering the generated payloads.

flowchart LR
    Content:::plain--> Privatev1 --> Payload:::plain
    classDef plain fill:none,stroke:transparent;

Payload Delivery

How payloads are sent and received by clients is not described in this protocol. The choice of delivery method has no impact on the security of this conversation type, though the choice may affect sender privacy and censorship resistance. In practice, any best-effort method of transmitting payloads will suffice, as no assumptions are made.

Initialization

Prior to operation participants MUST agree on the following parameters for each conversation.

• rda - delivery address (recipient) !TODO: Can delivery addresses be removed from this spec?
• sda - delivery address (sender)
• sk - initial secret key [32 bytes]

To maintain the security properties sk:

• MUST be known only by the participants.
• MUST be mutually authenticated.

Additionally implementations MUST determine the following constants:

• max_seg_size - maximum segmentation size.
• max_skip - number of keys which can be skipped per session.

Operation

There are 3 phases to operation.

flowchart TD
    C("Content"):::plain
    S(Segmentation)
    R(Reliability)
    E(Encryption) 
     D(Delivery):::plain
    C --> S --> R --> E --> D

    classDef plain fill:none,stroke:transparent;

• Segmentation: Divides contents into smaller fragments for transportation.
• Reliability: Adds tracking information to detect dropped messages.
• Encryption: Provides confidentiality and tamper resistence.

The output of each phase of the operational pipeline is the input of the next.

Segmentation

Thought the protocol has no limitation, it is assumed that a delivery mechanism MAY have restrictions on the max message size. While this is a transport level issue, it's included here because defering segementation has negative impacts on bandwidth efficiency and privacy. Forcing the transport layer to handle segmentation would require either reassembling unauthenticated segments which are open to malicious interference or implementing encryption at the transport layer. In the event of a dropped payload, segmentation after reliability would require clients to re-broadcast entire frames, rather than only the missing segments. Increasing load on the network, and increasing a DOS attack surface. To optimize the entire pipeline, segmentation is handled first, so that segments can benefit from the reliability and robust encryption already in place.

The segmentation strategy used is defined by !TODO: Flatten link once completed

!TODO: ^Spec currently has a limit of

Message Reliability

Scalable Data Sync is used to detect missing messages and provide delivery receipts to the sender after successful reception of a payload. SDS is implementated according to the specification.

!TODO: define: sender_id mapping !TODO: define: message_id mapping !TODO: update to latest version and inlcude SDS-R

!NOTE: The defaultConfig in nim-SDS creates a bloom filter with the parameters n=10000, p=0.001 which has a size of ~18KiB. The bloom filter is included in every message which results in a bestcase overhead rate of 13.3% (assuming waku's MSS of 150KB). Given a target content size of 4KB, that puts the utilization factor at 80+% (Without considering other layers). This needs to be looked at, lowering to n=2000 would lower overhead to ~3.5 KiB.

Encryption

Payloads are encrypted using doubleratchet.

With the following choices for external fucntions:

• DH: X25519
• KDF_RF: HKDF with SHA256, info = "logoschat_privatev1"
• KDF_CK: HKDF with SHA256, input = "0x01 for message key, and "0x02" for chainkey
• KDF_MK: HKDF with SHA256, hdkf.info = "PrivateV1MessageKey"
• ENCRYPT: Implemented with AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305

!TODO: Define AssociatedData

AEAD_CHACHA20_POLY1305 is implemented using randomly generated nonces. The nonce and tag are combined with the ciphertext for transport where ciphertext = nonce || encrypted_bytes || tag.

Wire Format Specification / Syntax

Payload Parse Tree

A deterministic parse tree is used to avoid ambiguity when recieving payloads.

flowchart TD

    D[DoubleRatchet]
    S[SDS Message]
    Seg1[ Segment]
    Seg2[ Segment]
    Seg3[ Segment]
    P[PrivateV1Frame]

    start@{ shape: start }
    start --> D
    D -->|Payload| S
    S -->|Payload| Seg1

    Seg1 --> P
    Seg2:::plain --> P
    Seg3:::plain --> P
    
    P --> T{frame_type}
    T --> ContentFrame
    T --> Placeholder

    classDef plain fill:none,stroke:transparent;

!TODO: Replace placeholder

Payloads

!TODO: Don't duplicate payload definitions from other specs. Though its helpful for now.

Encrypted Payload

message Doubleratchet {
    bytes dh = 1;               // 32 byte publickey
    uint32 msgNum = 2;          
    uint32 prevChainLen = 3;     
    bytes ciphertext = 4;       // arbitrary length bytes
}

dh: the x component of the dh_pair.publickey encoded as raw bytes. ciphertext: A protobuf encoded SDS Message

SDS Message

This payload is used without modification from the SDS Spec.

message HistoryEntry {
    string message_id = 1;        
    bytes retrieval_hint = 2;                      
  }
  
message ReliablePayload {
    string message_id = 2;      
    string channel_id = 3;  
    int32 lamport_timestamp = 10;    
    repeated HistoryEntry causal_history = 11;   
    bytes bloom_filter = 12; 
    bytes content = 20;                           
  }

content: This field is an protobuf encoded Segment

!TODO: Why is SDS using signed int for timestamps?

Segmentation

This payload is used without modification form the Segmentation specification

message SegmentMessageProto {
  bytes  entire_message_hash    = 1; // 32 Bytes
  uint32 index                  = 2; 
  uint32 segments_count         = 3;
  bytes  payload                = 4; 
  uint32 parity_segment_index   = 5;
  uint32 parity_segments_count  = 6; 
}

payload: This field is an protobuf encoded PrivateV1Frame

Frame

message PrivateV1Frame {                 
    uint64 timestamp = 3;             // Sender reported timestamp
	oneof frame_type {
		common_frames.ContentFrame content = 10;
        Placeholder placeholder = 11;
        // ....
	}
}

Implementation Suggestions

An implementation suggestions section may provide suggestions on how to approach implementation details, as well as more context an implementer may need to be aware off when proceeding with the implementation.

if available, point to existing implementations for reference.

(Further Optional Sections)

Security/Privacy Considerations

Segmentation Session Binding

Privacy - ContentSize

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

References

A list of references.