Beyond End-to-End

Phillip Hallam-Baker Tuesday, July 28, 2020: 1600. And in the plague years, the words "end-to-end encryption" were on everybody's lips. For they were using Zoom for education and commerce and their socially distanced sex parties, and suddenly became...

Phillip Hallam-Baker

Tuesday, July 28, 2020: 1600. And in the plague years, the words "end-to-end encryption" were on everybody's lips. For they were using Zoom for education and commerce and their socially distanced sex parties, and suddenly became worried that a government or two might be looking in. The fact that they had been doing all the same things over email for the past quarter century was never considered.

The purpose of end-to-end security is to reduce the number of parties the users are required to trust. Proprietary messaging products make use of "end-to-end" cryptography but fail to achieve that purpose. End-to-end means nothing if users are required to trust the sole source provider to identify those ends.

The Mathematical Mesh is a personal PKI that addresses the trust gap in current end-to-end solutions, allowing the user to manage credentials for all the applications they use. The Mesh is built using and enabling the use of threshold cryptography, a form of public key cryptography that enables further separation of cryptographic roles by splitting and combining private keys.

An alpha release of the Mesh under MIT license will be announced at the end of the presentation.