Citadel Dispatch CD166: JEFF GARDNER AND MAX HILLEBRAND - WHITE NOISE PRIVATE CHAT
Jul 10, 2025
Jeff Gardner, creator and lead maintainer of the secure messaging app White Noise, and Max Hillebrand, who handles its non-coding aspects, dive into the world of privacy in communications. They discuss how White Noise leverages the MLS protocol to enhance security compared to traditional apps like Signal. The pair emphasize the importance of user privacy while tackling metadata concerns and integration challenges within the Nostr ecosystem. Additionally, they touch on community involvement and the future of decentralized messaging technologies.
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White Noise vs Signal Privacy Model
- White Noise aims to deliver Signal-level privacy without central servers or controlling social graphs.
- Using public Nostr relays, it encrypts messages so the content and metadata remain hidden and secure.
MLS's Efficient Group Encryption
- MLS protocol uses a tree structure for group messaging, making encryption and membership changes more efficient.
- It offers better scaling in large groups than Signal's pairwise encryption approach.
White Noise Metadata Protection
- White Noise encrypts messages multiple times, publishing only encrypted payloads to relays with ephemeral keys.
- The only visible metadata to observers is a rotating group ID, obscuring message content and participant sizes.