x11joe, are you going to include PGP encryption in onemarket? i think it would be a valued feature, especially if its in an easy to use interface built into the wallet. unless the PoSA would already provide such security?
Disclaimer: I didn't really have time to double check everything I wrote, so this is unofficial, just talking out loud to get ideas right now.
I'm still working on the messaging part of the system as it's actually quite complex in a P2P environment, but PGP encryption (assuming you mean Pretty Good Encryption), in which public/private keys are used to encrypt the messages is something I was thinking of doing possibly.
To explain if we did this with the PGP method:
For example, lets you create a message to send to a listing. This message will be
encrypted with a random key generated on your system. The
random key is then
encrypted using your
public key. Every public key on your system has a corresponding
private key.
So the message is sent now throughout the network in 2 parts tied together. The data in encrypted form and the encrypted key throughout the network on the message ledger. Which for technical reasons will have to be limited to a certain amount of messages (or we might have to charge some very minor amount of cloak just to prevent spamming the system and filling up hard drive space, solutions welcome to this...).
To Decrypt the message, the person viewing the listing has to decrypt the encryption key to be able to decrypt the data. If you recall, the data is based on the random key that was encrypted using your public key.
So the seller needs to know the private key to essentially decrypt your encryption key to therefore decrypt the document.
This would allow you to put up messages back and forth on the P2P system without worrying about someone reading the message. Only issue is, how do you get the private key to the listee without everyone else seeing and being able to decrypt your messages?
Since this is P2P and Decentralized in Nature,
I essentially need to 'tell everyone your private key' without telling them, or put another way, listees wanting to view your messages need a way to get your private key and use it without actually seeing it. Otherwise all past messages might be able to be decrypted.
Even though the messages are stored encrypted with random keys everytime; one could make a program to go through the database using the private key until a message is decrypted and therefore those messages could be tied to you.
This is the part that makes it tricky. Solutions and ideas to this problem are welcome and is something I'm still pondering about as to the best way to do.
