Ask HN: Is OMEMO a good alternative to Signal for federated XMPP?

5 points

9 years ago

I recently learned about OMEMO, which is trying to replicate what Signal did with double ratcheting, but on top of Jabber/XMPP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO

What does the HN community think about this protocol? Is it a good idea?

And also, how are the actual implementations? From my experience, OTR implementations were horrible and often incompatible with each other, and I ended up going back to plaintext (oh, the times before Signal).

Conversations seem nice, but I don't like this quote from wikipedia - "E2E encryption there are OpenPGP, OTR Messaging, and OMEMO to choose from."

I am not sure more choice is good in this case. But I don't know the application itself, maybe it's done well.

(edit: well, it looks a bit confusing in the app itself, unfortunately. https://conversations.im/images/screenshot_encryption_selection.jpg Default is plaintext?)

Also, how is the server support? How error prone is it, etc.

edit: also, how is the support of group chat (like Signal has) and of synchronizing devices (like Signal has with mobile-desktop sync)

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