Andy Balaam
Andy is a long-time free/open source contributor who has worked as a programmer in many different industries, using a variety of technologies including C++, Java, Python, JavaScript and Rust. His hobbies are writing programming languages, coding retro games, and making programming videos.
He loves working with people to craft clean, well-tested code, and feels very privileged to be able to work on Matrix full-time in his job at Element.
Interventions
The Invisible Crypto initiative intends to make Matrix easier to use by ensuring that encrypted messaging is secure by default, and the user is not bothered by irrelevant information.
In this talk we will give a status update, hopefully explaining why crypto needed to become slightly more visible on the journey towards making it disappear.
We'll go into some detail about what we've done (and why some of it makes things a little more noisy) and what we plan to do to really get there.
Most modern software applications give total trust to the service provider. End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) services are different: the service provider is a gateway, and the real trust is with other people.
This is unfamiliar, and can make using E2EE confusing. When you add in federation (meaning lots of different service providers) and a diverse set of client apps, trying to make Matrix's encryption understandable is tricky.
It would help to have a shared set of words and definitions. In this talk I describe MSC4161, which attempts to establish a shared vocabulary, and then my own thoughts about some metaphors we can use to make these ideas easier to grasp.