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@grawity@social.treehouse.systems

Post #2336640

2026-05-06 19:55 UTC

@andrewg@mastodon.ie well, if they request e.g. a 16-bit prefix, they can't realistically bruteforce the remaining 144 bits (for every single of the retrieved keys) to determine valid fingerprints... they can hold on to the data, but it is useless until the fingerprint is published elsewhere (at which point it's just as easy to fetch the individual certificate by fingerprint) (I'd expect the server to refuse prefixes past some maximum length, like 20 or 32 bits, where it would stop being "privacy preserving" due to matching too few keys... but imo even with long prefixes of e.g. (x-64) bits it would be cheaper to find some other way of enumerating fingerprints (or really, scraping emails))

Replies (1)

  • @andrewg@mastodon.ie 2026-05-06 21:47

    @grawity@social.treehouse.systems I didn't say it was a smart idea, I just think we live in stupid times. ;-) I'm worried more about load on the server than any real privacy risk. Each prefix download object will have to be encrypted in real time (unless we want to double our disk usage by precomputing them).

    Open ##2336641