Researchers from several institutes worldwide recently developed Quarks, a new, decentralized messaging network based on blockchain technology. Their proposed system could overcome the limitations of most commonly used messaging platforms, allowing users to retain control over their personal data and other information they share online.
I believe their point was that even encrypted messages convey data. So if you have a record of all the encrypted messages, you can still tell who was talking, when they were talking, and approximately how much they said, even if you can’t read the messages.
If you wait until someone is gone and then loudly raid their house, you don’t need to read their messages to guess the content of what they send to people as soon as they find out. Now you know who else you want to target, despite not being able to read a single message.
This type of metadata analysis is able to reveal a lot about what’s being communicated. It’s why private communication should be ephemeral, so that only what’s directly intercepted can be scrutinized.
That was exactly why I said “Did they learn nothing from the Obama administration?”
From 2014: “We kill people based on metadata.” (Michael Hayden, former DIRNSA, 2014.ev)
There is no “harmless” here.
But in this case, the metadata is not accessible to outsiders.
If you can see it, you can analyze it. Metadata is more than message headers; traffic analysis generates usable metadata, too.
Any form of internet communication is potentially susceptible to traffic analysis, so that flaw isn’t specific to this particular design.
The goals here are to address some of the other weaknesses of communication protocols, ie lack of auditability and reliance on a central server. They do not claim it’s completely impervious to attack.
Not sure how this would work, but potentially one advantage of blockchain over peer-to-peer is less metadata needed?
All the encrypted messaged just get dumped into the public blockchain, you might be able to glean who (or at least where) a message was sent from, but the reader could be anyone with a decryption key. A bigger channel, like a newsletter type thing would just involve more read keys being available. Kind of like old school cold war numbers stations or encoded messages in the classifieds. You might be able to figure out that KGB agent Pyotr placed a classified ad for “Golden Lab, found near 5th Ave. and Main St.” in the “lost and Fond” section, but there would be no way to know which of the papers many readers would be able to decode the message.
Of course the practical problem would be the size and scale of the blockchain. I think Bitcoin 1.0 was only able to do 7 transactions/second. With each message a transaction, and each read requiring the reader to pick out their message from the pile, my above hypothesis would have to be compromised in some fashion to be usable.