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few more thoughts on untrusted servers / group docs

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Sarah Jamie Lewis 2022-05-26 13:09:38 -07:00
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@ -46,14 +46,15 @@ can learn anything about the contents or the metadata if your conversation.
**Note: Metadata Resistant Group Communication is still an active research area and what is documented here
will likely change in the future.**
**TODO: Expand**
In order to get around the limitation of being always-online, Cwtch has built in support for hosting
conversations on **Untrusted Servers**.
In many respects communication with a server is identical to communication with a regular Cwtch peer,
all the authentication and encryption steps above are taken however the server always acts as the inbound peer, and the outbound
peer always uses newly generated **ephemeral keypair** as their "longterm identity".
These servers can be set up by anyone and are intended to be always online. Most importantly, all communication with a
server is designed such that the server learns as little information as possible about the contents or metadata.
As such, peer-server conversations only differ in the *kinds* of messages that are sent between the two parties,
with the server relaying all messages that it receives and also allowing any client to query for older messages.
The risk model associated with servers is more complicated that peer-to-peer communication, as such we currently
require people who want to use servers within cwtch to [opt-in to the Group Chat experiment](/docs/groups/enable-experiment)
in order to add, manage and create groups on untrusted servers.
## Getting Started