Just an idea to make the Fediverse better, what do you think about it? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by thecookingsenpai@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10918621

Reason: wrong community

Work in Progress: Adding more details on the motivation

I have this proposal for ActivityPub

NOTE: This proposal is based on https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#authorization and https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/ActivityPub/Authentication_Authorization consulted on 06 January 2024.

Considering that the entire section on safety considerations is presented as non-normative

Given that "at the time of standardisation there are no strongly agreed mechanisms for authentication. " as per the above reference

Assuming that the ultimate goal is to have a decentralised, persistent and verifiable identity.

Premise: The following proposal represents a radical and potentially disruptive change to the current ActivityPub specifications. In particular the following parts:

ActivityPub clients authenticate to a server using OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens.

Related OAuth considerations

It is also important to note that the following proposal can coexist with current OAuth authentication.

The proposed encryption algorithm (ED25519) can and should be updated in the event of a vulnerability or major upgrade.

Suggestion

I have no idea how to write a document like this correctly, and I am probably doing it wrong, but my only goal is to stimulate discussion.

The proposal is as follows.

ActivityPub clients authenticate against a server using ED25519 signatures In general, bearer tokens can be easily replaced by signatures in almost every aspect. Advantages:

Servers don't need to store anything other than a session token.

Authentication is decentralised and context independent

Your key is your identity: no server breach can expose your data

There are mature libraries like node-forge (for nodeJS and TS) and many others that allow easy implementation of authentication.

I have tried to think about possible downsides, but the goal of this post is to stimulate discussion, please keep it respectful, but of course criticism and additions are welcome!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] rimu@piefed.social 7 points 9 months ago

As far as I know, most activitypub traffic is server to server. There are few, if any, activitypub clients - they use APIs instead. So there's a Lemmy API, a Mastodon API, etc that apps use.