When cookie spewers single you out, it IS personal, barks watchdog.Chat among yourselves: New EU law may force the big IM platforms to open up.Open Source Policy Summit: Where FOSS and government meet.'Service providers will need a fair amount of latitude in their ability to deny access requests to continue to guard against malicious data scraping and mining, regardless of whether interoperable is implemented through client-side bridging or an open standard,' the researchers argue. What's more, these APIs can't be entirely open due to the sensitive nature of the messages being handled. Under this scenario, platforms would maintain their own E2EE protocols and offer a client-side interface for other messaging services to connect over a bridge.īut this approach also has challenges because gatekeepers – large platform providers – would need to create bridges for each different message provider and, as the boffins observe, this has security implications.

Given concerns that innovation is easier with a centralized, unfederated protocol than a federated, distributed scheme, Blessing and Anderson see platform API bridges as the more likely scenario, at least in the short term. But variations in implementation – Signal, WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and others rely on different versions of the Signal protocol – make standardization difficult. Leading contenders for a common protocol include Matrix, Signal, and the IETF's MLS (Messaging Layer Security), the two computer scientists say. Interoperability goal makes security more complexīlessing and Anderson say there are two broad ways to approach message platform interoperability, a common protocol or platform-based open APIs for third-party connectivity. Interoperability, the researchers argue, represents a dramatic expansion of the trust surface for messaging users, who now have to consider the practices and policies of gatekeeper partners. Then there are the non-technical issues – how services cooperate with one another to tackle spam and abuse, how they deal with vulnerabilities and outages.

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