:boost_requested: Pitching a new federation protocol
@networkexception @startrek Nothing is a magic fix. The cryptographic property of plausible deniability is not, either. "Deniability" has to be contextualized with "in front of whom?". There is strong evidence that plausible deniability in current messengers such as Signal or WhatsApp has little to no real-world impact; neither in a court of law, nor in front of the general public or friends. Designing a system, which can achieve plausible deniability in the real world is possible, but would require that this system is designed with this property as a primary purpose.I implore you to read petsymposium.org/popets/2025/popets-2025-0018.pdf, a rather recent paper on this exact topic which, on top of providing own research, information and conclusions, meta-analyzes and references currently existing research on the same or similar issues.
For the intents and purposes of how I envision polyproto to be used, the cryptographic property of plausible deniability in signatures is not something I want to focus on achieving, and I firmly hold the belief, that there are plenty of more pressing issues to consider when designing a secure messaging system, such as—in an encrypted, confidential setting—leaking little to no cleartext metadata. In fact, this protocol heavily relies and benefits from the guarantees offered by non-repudiaton properties.