Long email login as public key

Feature Proposal
1

Some messaging systems make use of such approach: username is public key. In case of DC this could be loooongrandomlylookingstring@domain.tld

It’s common design pattern now, so maybe it was discursed before?

In short - there are pros and cons.
Pro - user can only share username, no need to separate pubkey.
Cons - some mail servers may limit login length; and spammers will send encrypted spam.

I’m not actually propose to implement it - I’m just curious what clever people here are thinking about it.

1 Like
2

since version 2 delta chat is moving away from email as identity, so the email address doesn’t matter, you will have several address at the same time in the future to increase resilience, if one chatmail server gets blocked or goes down you can keep chatting without even noticing

2 Likes
3

So you’d be using the key as an identity, via multiple accounts, if I’ve understood. Or maybe identity would be another layer to allow key rotation.

4

If you mean multiple email accounts on different servers, like:

  • loooongrandomlylookingstring@domain.tld
  • loooongrandomlylookingstring@example.net
  • loooongrandomlylookingstring@gmail.com
    then it’s problematic.
    With fresh new private and public key the possibility of looong username collision is near zero.
    When your email is known to the public, anyone can create account with same username on servers not controlled by you. Owner of such account will not have the private key, but anyway it’s not the best situation.

No clue here. What’s your idea?

1 Like
5

Sorry, I was very unclear. I was not actually talking about keyhash addresses. I think those might have the problem that they expose the public key, which DT tries not to do, I think as an anti-spam measure.

I meant several different random [nine chars]@example.com accounts might use the same key, being mere redundant comms channels for the key. The identity is not address-specific but key-specific. A contact who sees the e-mail address change does not care, if the key is unchanged it assumes it’s the same person and keeps chatting. I think this is what Adbenitez is describing. But then you could not rotate keys without rotating identities.

If an identity had several keys, and all the contacts knew all those keys, the identity could rotate keys without manual intervention. You’d have to keep the contacts automatically updated too, tho, or you would run out of keys.