Oddbean

After working on this on and off for 7 days, I've finally finished implementing NIP-44 encryption in Swift for use on Apple platforms! This will replace the unrecommended NIP-04 encryption. Definitely lost a few hairs and gained a few gray ones. 😅 Thanks to @montzstar for reviewing my PR to Nostr SDK for Apple Platforms and thanks to @mplorentz from Nos for pair programming with me when I got stuck. https://github.com/nostr-sdk/nostr-sdk-ios/pull/138 I’ve submitted a forked copy to the shared nip44 repo. Please review and double-check my work if you’re able to read Swift code. All the test vectors pass, though. @paulmillr @Vitor Pamplona @Magister Michael Dilger M.Sc. https://github.com/paulmillr/nip44/pull/11

The claim is that every time you encrypt a message with NIP-04, it decreases the difficulty for an attacker to determine your private key. I’m not a cryptographer, so I can’t verify the claim. The design and professional cryptography audit of NIP-44 was funded by OpenSats, mitigates that attack vector, and is allegedly a better encryption scheme than NIP-04. It does have known limitations as mentioned in the specification. NIP-04 is unrecommended but it has not yet been replaced in all the other NIPs that use it. The developer community needs to work on moving towards implementing NIP-44 encryption for all encrypted messages, including DMs, while still maintaining backward compatibility with NIP-04 encrypted messages. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/44.md https://opensats.org/blog/nostr-grants-december-2023#nip-44-cryptography-audit

One real world scenario I encountered while testing coracle is that if only nip-44 is implemented this is not backwards compatible with nip-04. Not sure at all about NIPs best practices, and if this is best addressed at all in NIPs, SDKs. I think @hodlbod had thought this through on coracle, and there was some bug he squashed to make these DMs NIPs compatible.

The way I see it working is: 1. Have all the major clients and SDKs support encryption and decryption for both NIP-04 and NIP-44 for some time but have NIP-44 be the default for encryption. 2. Clients can allow users to migrate their signed NIP-04 encrypted events by decrypting them and creating new ones with identical content but encrypted with NIP-44. 3. Once most people stop creating new NIP-04 encrypted events, remove support for encrypting in NIP-04 and support only decrypting NIP-04 moving forward. NIP-44 becomes the only way to encrypt events.

Coracle handles backwards compatibility to nip-04 fine, no issues with Coracle. I mentioned to Terry that some apps may still use nip-04, and not nip-44. Therefore if new apps build only nip-44, without taking into account backwards compatibility this would be a nostr interoperability or #nostrability pain point.

New private DM system coming to your nearest iOS app. 🚀 nostr:nevent1qqsrpu3pjw2ql5thzp73p2xvtllz3fpchfxfphrdr379egfruez7gqspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfdupzqfme70vlgtraactlpe4umnuf4ruatyk3nca3h0f8auw0l5d8lxx3qvzqqqqqqyrtdqx6