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Thursday 16th October
Friday 17th October

The Role of the Matrix Protocol within Germany’s Sovereign and Secure Health Messenger Solution – A Loyal Player Embracing the Evolution of Secure Architectures

Germany’s digital health infrastructure has long been built on the principles of sovereignty, open standards, and interoperability. With the electronic patient record (ePA) and KIM for secure data and document exchange, Germany established a federated ecosystem using standards such as FHIR and OIDC with sectoral identity providers. The recent introduction of the TI-Messenger (TIM) extends this ecosystem to real-time communication — now connecting over 25 million insured citizens through the RISE TI-Messenger, directly integrated into their ePA app (ePA FdV). Matrix serves here not as the foundation of sovereignty, but as a loyal enabler within an existing sovereign architecture. Operating own Matrix instances (e.g. via the RISE Cloud) ensures data locality and governance under German regulatory control, while federation allows secure inter-institutional communication. This approach balances federated flexibility and controlled trust domains, distinguishing Germany’s model from purely centralized or global platform solutions. The talk discusses the integration of Matrix within the sovereign health stack — ePA, sIDP, KIM, TIM, and OIDC — and explores risks and resilience in large-scale federation. It illustrates how Germany’s health communication layer evolves from document exchange to conversational care, preserving sovereignty while embracing interoperable, open technologies.

Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Thomas Grechenig
Healthcare
Alan Turing
Saturday 18th October

Tune Your Chat

This workshop is an "interactive talk" with an introduction by the host but the wish for attendees to also present their ideas about [matrix] bridges, bots & other integrations.

Kim Brose
Hands-on
Alan Turing
No Video

How do messaging app users feel about untraceability?

Messaging platforms offer to protect user privacy via a variety of features, such as disappearing messages, password-protected chats, and end-to-end encryption (E2EE), which primarily protect message contents. Beyond such features, "untraceable communication" tools for instant messaging protect users from network attackers observing transport layer metadata, which can reveal who communicates with whom, when, and how often. However, unlike E2EE, the effectiveness of these tools depends on large anonymity sets, making widespread user adoption critical. This talk presents a research study with 189 users of messaging apps about their perceptions of "untraceability" as a concept, as well as their opinions on the widespread availability of tools for untraceability. The study explores their perceptions of "untraceability'' from a broad conceptual standpoint; rather than focusing on a particular tool or implementation, we analyze how users reason about what features should be incorporated by two fictitious messaging platforms, Texty and Chatty, to prevent third parties from "knowing who communicates with whom". The results point to a critical gap between how users and privacy experts understand untraceability, as well as tensions between users that see untraceability as a protection to individual privacy and users that see it as a threat to online safety and criminal accountability. Beyond untraceability, I discuss how this research is relevant to the design of messaging platforms that promote privacy as a central value.

Carla Griggio
Privacy, Policy & Moderation
Ada Byron

The recordings are available on media.ccc.de or YouTube.

All videos and slides linked or published here are available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Thank you to all community-provided mirrors, including Innovation Hub Peertube.

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