From 3d003632c468f07e8fd72eeac9988bffd584e80c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Torsten Grote Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 15:10:46 +0000 Subject: [PATCH] Add question about multiple identities/profiles/accounts --- FAQ.md | 13 ++++++++++++- 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/FAQ.md b/FAQ.md index 3bb1f52..6badad8 100644 --- a/FAQ.md +++ b/FAQ.md @@ -46,4 +46,15 @@ A post will be shared with someone if all of these conditions are fullfilled: When the other person receives the post, they apply the same rules to share it with their own contacts, and so on across the social graph. -In more technical terms, each forum/group/blog has a distribution graph where the nodes are subscribers and the edges are a subset of contact relationships (specifically, the subset that have chosen to reveal the subscription to each other). \ No newline at end of file +In more technical terms, each forum/group/blog has a distribution graph where the nodes are subscribers and the edges are a subset of contact relationships (specifically, the subset that have chosen to reveal the subscription to each other). + +# Can I have multiple identities/profiles/accounts? + +Short Answer: No. That is not supported by Briar. + +Long Answer: In a p2p network it's hard to prevent identities from being linked to each other if they live on the same device. +Consider the scenario where you have two identities, `A` and `B`. A contact of `A` and a contact of `B` get together and try to find out whether `A` and `B` are the same person. What information could they use? + +* First, the times when `A` and `B` are online. In a p2p network we can't hide this from our contacts +* Second, the network addresses that they use to communicate with `A` and `B`. If we use Tor then we can have a separate hidden service address for each identity, so that's fine. But with WiFi and Bluetooth, the contacts can compare the addresses we gave them and see that it's the same device. +* Third, they could look for information leaks at the application layer. For example they could try to introduce `A` to `B`, and see if the protocol behaves differently than it would if `A` and `B` were on different devices. If we supported multiple identities, we'd have to be very careful to avoid any leaks like this in our application-layer code. \ No newline at end of file