Subject: [Cfrg] Bitmessage Protocol Proposal

From: "Jonathan Warren" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:00:11 -0500

I'm wondering if members of this list would be interested in reviewing a
protocol (and eventually an open source client) that I am working on called
Bitmessage. It is a P2P protocol which uses the same message-forwarding
mechanism as Bitcoin to allow two people to send each other email-like
messages. The goals are for the system to be decentralized, trustless, and
secure, for identities to be easily authenticated (so that humans don't need
to manage keys), and to hide "non-content" data like the sender and receiver
of messages. To implement ECIES and ECDH, I am planning on relying on a
Python wrapper for OpenSSL.

Below are the links to two whitepapers: one technical (more of a
specification) and one less-technical (more of an introduction) which
describes the protocol and how it would work. I'm reasonably new to these
cryptographic algorithms so if anyone can think of any potential problems or
details of the protocol that should be different, I would be interested to
hear them.
http://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf 
http://bitmessage.org/Bitmessage%20Technical%20Paper.pdf 

I very much appreciate your time.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Warren