8 ms·

I can see a lot of people trashing on Matrix.org or the "hacker" themselves (the hacker opened a series of issues, detailing how he managed to get in - https://

I can see a lot of people trashing on Matrix.org or the "hacker" themselves (the hacker opened a series of issues, detailing how he managed to get in - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/created_by/matrixnotorg https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/created_by/m...). However everyone seems to be missing the point - matrix seems like a pretty cool and open project. And someone taking over their infrastructure in such an open way is also great for the community. Even though a little dubious on the legal side of things, I believe it's great it was approached with transparency and a dose of humor. Some might argue that this is harmful to matrix as a product and as a brand. But as long as there was no actual harm done and they react appropriately by taking infrastructure security seriously, it could play out well in the end for them. This whole ordeal could end up actually increase trust in the project, if they take swift steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again.

chronogram 7y ago
There are some weird people in those issue threads..
- executesorder66 7y ago
  What did they say? The comments have been deleted.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ozzmotik 7y ago
  checking in as an internet weird person here, any time you have a platform that synthesizes anonymity with collaboration/social interaction, weirdos like us are gonna pop out like clockwork because we find a safe haven for our, uh, weird stuff. a place to not be judged or whatever. i think the sjw type terminology for it is a safe space. and of course due to the human element being so easily corruptible, many people do also tend to use such things for illicit purposes. hey anybody else remember the days of T-Philez?
nukeop 7y ago
It ruins the trust completely if something presenting itself as a way to communicate safely and securely is itself ridden with so many security problems. I know I won't be using matrix for anything sensitive anymore.
comboy 7y ago
> The matrix.org homeserver has been rebuilt and is running securely; We should have more bounties. Let users donate and put wallets on servers. Attacker will be able to take these funds. It's a reasonable measure of an infrastructure security.
- majewsky 7y ago
  To avoid perverse incentives, you should also build in some reward for the developers/operators. As in: If the server gets hacked, the money goes to the whitehat. If the server does not get hacked for $TIMEFRAME, the money goes to the people responsible for its security.
  - chronogram 7y ago
    Seems perverse to me as well. Might be a better idea to just fund Matrix enough to be able to have at least someone full time on it. With $3 752 per month on Patreon right now I cannot imagine it's a lot after infrastructure costs and taxes. Certainly not enough to let Arathorn or someone go out of his way to get expensive security training.
  - _red 7y ago
    Also, there is a requirement for the hacker to actually publish the results of how they did it. Otherwise, you run the risk of the hacker just walking away with the funds or giving a bogus reason (after they've already spent the wallet). Therefore, the wallets should be stored GPG encrypted in some published location. After the hacker has successfully penetrated and retrieved the file, they need to publish a "how I did it" document along with the hash of the GPG encrypted wallet. Once devs have confirmed the vulnerabilities exist, they respond with the passphrase to decrypt the wallet.
    - ipoopatwork 7y ago
      Unless I'm missing the joke, this is a bug bounty with extra steps.
chme 7y ago
I would like for matrix protocol and implementation to be better prepared for such cases. While I didn't loose access to the encrypted messages, since I used the 'Encrypted Messages Recovery' function of Riot.im, I guess a lot of people have. Maybe allow to store more information on the client side?
- MayeulC 7y ago
  I do not really like the fact that this feature can only backup keys server-side, so I did not enable it. I do however have a keys backup dating back some time, that will hopefully restore some of my encrypted messages. But basically, I understand that every encrypted message was at risk of being lost, so it's not that big of a deal.
  - cyphar 7y ago
    The backed up keys are encrypted against a client-generated Curve25519 public key, with new session keys being added incrementally (so you don't need to provide the key after you set it up)[1]. Personally I don't see it as much more of a risk than trusting them to host the ciphertext of your messages. People have different threat models. When chatting with my family, it's more important that we have a permanent history of our messages rather than the worry of them getting leaked. But if you're a whistleblower you have a different set of requirements. [1]: https://github.com/uhoreg/matrix-doc/blob/e2e_backup/proposals/1219-storing-megolm-keys-serverside.md https://github.com/uhoreg/matrix-doc/blob/e2e_backup/proposa...
- Aaronn 7y ago
  You have always been able to export your keys manually to a file.
tarruda 7y ago
On the first issue opened by the hacker: > Complete compromise could have been avoided if developers were prohibited from using ForwardAgent yes or not using -A in their SSH commands. The flaws with agent forwarding are well documented. I use agent forwarding daily and had no idea it contained well known security holes. If that's the case, why is the feature available by default?
- XMPPwocky 7y ago
  SSH agent forwarding makes your ssh-agent available to (possibly some subset of) hosts you SSH into. This is its purpose. Unfortunately, it also makes your ssh-agent available to (possibly some subset of) hosts you SSH into.
  - scanr 7y ago
    Is there a secure alternative that achieves the same outcome?
    - RL_Quine 7y ago
      `ProxyJump`
      - aidos 7y ago
        Hadn’t seem that before. Article here explains is briefly https://www.madboa.com/blog/2017/11/02/ssh-proxyjump/ https://www.madboa.com/blog/2017/11/02/ssh-proxyjump/
        theamk 7y ago
        This article is .. weird. It mentions SOCKS5, DynamicForwarding and "decent version of nc", while you don't need anything at all for forwarding connection -- SOCKS is not involved in any way, and initial 1995 release of nc would work just fine. Here is a much better explanation (from [0]): > ProxyJump was added in OpenSSH 7.3 but is nothing more than a shorthand for using ProxyCommand, as in: "ProxyCommand ssh proxy-host -W %h:%p" so the same thing that top poster was talking about. [0] https://superuser.com/questions/1253960/replace-proxyjump-in-ssh-config https://superuser.com/questions/1253960/replace-proxyjump-in...
notyourday 7y ago
Matrix operational security is a joke and developers understanding of security is a joke. This is 2019, not 1992. Infrastructure with ssh access without hole punching for currently active authorized connections only? Decrypted signing keys accessible over the network? CI servers and developers having root access? Though the "we had to revoke all the keys so you lost access to your encrypted messages unless you backed them up" takes the cake.
- viraptor 7y ago
  > "we had to revoke all the keys so you lost access to your encrypted messages unless you backed them up" takes the cake This is just how it works. It's been well documented and mobile clients got updates that backs up the keys automatically. It's also effectively the same as WhatsApp and some other IMs (they just don't even save your encrypted messages). Either way - backup, or lose your history.
  - notyourday 7y ago
    I stand by the assertion that it indicates the Matrix people are clueless. If this is a design constraint, then the security model needs to accommodate that the user keys are the pot of gold, which means that there needs to be a service provided by a dedicated server which is inaccessible in the course of normal operation via any means other than a well defined braindead simple protocol <keyid>:<command>:<message> providing the message manipulations/key store functions from only other authorized production hosts that need to be able to access this functionality. The server running the service should have a security policy that would prevent one from running any software that is not supposed to be already present on a server ( use SELinux enforcement policy ) to minimize the attack surface; have its own SSH keys not generally accessible during the normal operation, be accessible only from specific IP addresses, etc etc etc. If it is on AWS, it should probably be in a separate account.
    - ATsch 7y ago
      I think you misunderstand why the keys were deleted. The keys get deleted on the client when you log out. This is sensible, because if you log out on a device, you probably don't want to keep the keys around in your browser storage. When the users session is destructed on the server, existing clients get a 403 error and told that their session is logged out. When that happens, they go through the normal logout routine which involves deleting the keys on disk. Deleting the keys isn't something the matrix.org folks explicitly had to do because of the compromise; it's simply how the riot.im client reacts when you terminate it's session.
microwavecamera 7y ago
Or the hacker could have responsibly disclosed the issue to Matrix then reported their findings like a professional. Besides, we're still defacing web sites? I though that went out of style years ago. Did the hacker make sure to post that on MySpace too?
- syntonym 7y ago
  Responsible disclosure is about not enabling third parties to leverage the disclosure to gain access. In this case the hacker did not disclose the security holes before they were closed for third parties (i.e. the hacker could only still access the hosts because he had access to the them in the past, new access was (hopefully) not possible anymore). Which of course doesn't mean that the hacker should have just send an email to the matrix team.
maxidorius 7y ago
One of the swift steps should be to address https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1194 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1194 and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1915 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1915 and https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4540 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4540 properly, so others servers cannot be impacted in any way.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
there are quite a couple of so called guides (opsec playbooks for crime) that I found specifically on Wall Street Market (a darknet market place like the now defunct Silkroad), available for purchase. Some of them go beyond just instruction booklets but promise access to their chat systems via invitation (upon purchase of the pdf) and offer some kind of limited coaching. It is essentially the recruiting mechanism to bring in lower ranking soldiers starting out as mules, handlers, or basically move up from re-selling goods. A couple of these guides point out how much Telegram sucks etc, and that they now have moved to p2p based systems. One praised Matrix heavily for it's good security feature. The tech-savvy-ness of many vendors has picked up considerably since I first started watching. There is a strong push to re-think and refactor both tools and their processes (yes yes - this happens constantly otherwise they get caught, but never as fast or aggressive than these past months). It's likely that this is just a (s)kiddy enjoying the attention. Though quite a lot of players have more than just an "academic" desire to ensure these (their) systems can withstand an attack by LE. When I browsed the matrix issues on github I couldn't help but immediately recall the strange emphasis on "we have switched to matrix". It's far fetched but I'd say somebody may have a strong interest in seeing these issues resolved (->or has gotten genuinely fed up and wanted to do something, as opposed to this being just a skid that only did it for the attention) for a good analysis on how some of these tutorials and the philosophy behind them see: "Discovering credit card fraud methods in online tutorials" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303418684_Discovering_credit_card_fraud_methods_in_online_tutorials https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303418684_Discoveri...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jammygit 7y ago
Github issue got closed or removed it looks like. There is a new issue where people are complaining about the first getting closed: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367
- Aaronn 7y ago
  They were getting a ton of spam messages so they have been locked so that only collaborators can talk. They will be restored when the spam stops https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367#issuecomment-482505988 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367#issuecom....
cyansmoker 7y ago
I agreed with your comment, until I followed the github link and found that all issues had been removed.

chronogram 7y ago

There are some weird people in those issue threads..

executesorder66 7y ago
What did they say? The comments have been deleted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ozzmotik 7y ago
checking in as an internet weird person here, any time you have a platform that synthesizes anonymity with collaboration/social interaction, weirdos like us are gonna pop out like clockwork because we find a safe haven for our, uh, weird stuff. a place to not be judged or whatever. i think the sjw type terminology for it is a safe space. and of course due to the human element being so easily corruptible, many people do also tend to use such things for illicit purposes. hey anybody else remember the days of T-Philez?

nukeop 7y ago

It ruins the trust completely if something presenting itself as a way to communicate safely and securely is itself ridden with so many security problems. I know I won't be using matrix for anything sensitive anymore.

comboy 7y ago

> The matrix.org homeserver has been rebuilt and is running securely; We should have more bounties. Let users donate and put wallets on servers. Attacker will be able to take these funds. It's a reasonable measure of an infrastructure security.

majewsky 7y ago
To avoid perverse incentives, you should also build in some reward for the developers/operators. As in: If the server gets hacked, the money goes to the whitehat. If the server does not get hacked for $TIMEFRAME, the money goes to the people responsible for its security.
- chronogram 7y ago
  Seems perverse to me as well. Might be a better idea to just fund Matrix enough to be able to have at least someone full time on it. With $3 752 per month on Patreon right now I cannot imagine it's a lot after infrastructure costs and taxes. Certainly not enough to let Arathorn or someone go out of his way to get expensive security training.
- _red 7y ago
  Also, there is a requirement for the hacker to actually publish the results of how they did it. Otherwise, you run the risk of the hacker just walking away with the funds or giving a bogus reason (after they've already spent the wallet). Therefore, the wallets should be stored GPG encrypted in some published location. After the hacker has successfully penetrated and retrieved the file, they need to publish a "how I did it" document along with the hash of the GPG encrypted wallet. Once devs have confirmed the vulnerabilities exist, they respond with the passphrase to decrypt the wallet.
  - ipoopatwork 7y ago
    Unless I'm missing the joke, this is a bug bounty with extra steps.

chme 7y ago

I would like for matrix protocol and implementation to be better prepared for such cases. While I didn't loose access to the encrypted messages, since I used the 'Encrypted Messages Recovery' function of Riot.im, I guess a lot of people have. Maybe allow to store more information on the client side?

MayeulC 7y ago
I do not really like the fact that this feature can only backup keys server-side, so I did not enable it. I do however have a keys backup dating back some time, that will hopefully restore some of my encrypted messages. But basically, I understand that every encrypted message was at risk of being lost, so it's not that big of a deal.
- cyphar 7y ago
  The backed up keys are encrypted against a client-generated Curve25519 public key, with new session keys being added incrementally (so you don't need to provide the key after you set it up)[1]. Personally I don't see it as much more of a risk than trusting them to host the ciphertext of your messages. People have different threat models. When chatting with my family, it's more important that we have a permanent history of our messages rather than the worry of them getting leaked. But if you're a whistleblower you have a different set of requirements. [1]: https://github.com/uhoreg/matrix-doc/blob/e2e_backup/proposals/1219-storing-megolm-keys-serverside.md https://github.com/uhoreg/matrix-doc/blob/e2e_backup/proposa...
Aaronn 7y ago
You have always been able to export your keys manually to a file.

tarruda 7y ago

On the first issue opened by the hacker: > Complete compromise could have been avoided if developers were prohibited from using ForwardAgent yes or not using -A in their SSH commands. The flaws with agent forwarding are well documented. I use agent forwarding daily and had no idea it contained well known security holes. If that's the case, why is the feature available by default?

XMPPwocky 7y ago
SSH agent forwarding makes your ssh-agent available to (possibly some subset of) hosts you SSH into. This is its purpose. Unfortunately, it also makes your ssh-agent available to (possibly some subset of) hosts you SSH into.
- scanr 7y ago
  Is there a secure alternative that achieves the same outcome?
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    `ProxyJump`
    - aidos 7y ago
      Hadn’t seem that before. Article here explains is briefly https://www.madboa.com/blog/2017/11/02/ssh-proxyjump/ https://www.madboa.com/blog/2017/11/02/ssh-proxyjump/
      - theamk 7y ago
        This article is .. weird. It mentions SOCKS5, DynamicForwarding and "decent version of nc", while you don't need anything at all for forwarding connection -- SOCKS is not involved in any way, and initial 1995 release of nc would work just fine. Here is a much better explanation (from [0]): > ProxyJump was added in OpenSSH 7.3 but is nothing more than a shorthand for using ProxyCommand, as in: "ProxyCommand ssh proxy-host -W %h:%p" so the same thing that top poster was talking about. [0] https://superuser.com/questions/1253960/replace-proxyjump-in-ssh-config https://superuser.com/questions/1253960/replace-proxyjump-in...

notyourday 7y ago

Matrix operational security is a joke and developers understanding of security is a joke. This is 2019, not 1992. Infrastructure with ssh access without hole punching for currently active authorized connections only? Decrypted signing keys accessible over the network? CI servers and developers having root access? Though the "we had to revoke all the keys so you lost access to your encrypted messages unless you backed them up" takes the cake.

viraptor 7y ago
> "we had to revoke all the keys so you lost access to your encrypted messages unless you backed them up" takes the cake This is just how it works. It's been well documented and mobile clients got updates that backs up the keys automatically. It's also effectively the same as WhatsApp and some other IMs (they just don't even save your encrypted messages). Either way - backup, or lose your history.
- notyourday 7y ago
  I stand by the assertion that it indicates the Matrix people are clueless. If this is a design constraint, then the security model needs to accommodate that the user keys are the pot of gold, which means that there needs to be a service provided by a dedicated server which is inaccessible in the course of normal operation via any means other than a well defined braindead simple protocol <keyid>:<command>:<message> providing the message manipulations/key store functions from only other authorized production hosts that need to be able to access this functionality. The server running the service should have a security policy that would prevent one from running any software that is not supposed to be already present on a server ( use SELinux enforcement policy ) to minimize the attack surface; have its own SSH keys not generally accessible during the normal operation, be accessible only from specific IP addresses, etc etc etc. If it is on AWS, it should probably be in a separate account.
  - ATsch 7y ago
    I think you misunderstand why the keys were deleted. The keys get deleted on the client when you log out. This is sensible, because if you log out on a device, you probably don't want to keep the keys around in your browser storage. When the users session is destructed on the server, existing clients get a 403 error and told that their session is logged out. When that happens, they go through the normal logout routine which involves deleting the keys on disk. Deleting the keys isn't something the matrix.org folks explicitly had to do because of the compromise; it's simply how the riot.im client reacts when you terminate it's session.

microwavecamera 7y ago

Or the hacker could have responsibly disclosed the issue to Matrix then reported their findings like a professional. Besides, we're still defacing web sites? I though that went out of style years ago. Did the hacker make sure to post that on MySpace too?

syntonym 7y ago
Responsible disclosure is about not enabling third parties to leverage the disclosure to gain access. In this case the hacker did not disclose the security holes before they were closed for third parties (i.e. the hacker could only still access the hosts because he had access to the them in the past, new access was (hopefully) not possible anymore). Which of course doesn't mean that the hacker should have just send an email to the matrix team.

maxidorius 7y ago

One of the swift steps should be to address https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1194 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1194 and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1915 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1915 and https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4540 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/4540 properly, so others servers cannot be impacted in any way.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

there are quite a couple of so called guides (opsec playbooks for crime) that I found specifically on Wall Street Market (a darknet market place like the now defunct Silkroad), available for purchase. Some of them go beyond just instruction booklets but promise access to their chat systems via invitation (upon purchase of the pdf) and offer some kind of limited coaching. It is essentially the recruiting mechanism to bring in lower ranking soldiers starting out as mules, handlers, or basically move up from re-selling goods. A couple of these guides point out how much Telegram sucks etc, and that they now have moved to p2p based systems. One praised Matrix heavily for it's good security feature. The tech-savvy-ness of many vendors has picked up considerably since I first started watching. There is a strong push to re-think and refactor both tools and their processes (yes yes - this happens constantly otherwise they get caught, but never as fast or aggressive than these past months). It's likely that this is just a (s)kiddy enjoying the attention. Though quite a lot of players have more than just an "academic" desire to ensure these (their) systems can withstand an attack by LE. When I browsed the matrix issues on github I couldn't help but immediately recall the strange emphasis on "we have switched to matrix". It's far fetched but I'd say somebody may have a strong interest in seeing these issues resolved (->or has gotten genuinely fed up and wanted to do something, as opposed to this being just a skid that only did it for the attention) for a good analysis on how some of these tutorials and the philosophy behind them see: "Discovering credit card fraud methods in online tutorials" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303418684_Discovering_credit_card_fraud_methods_in_online_tutorials https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303418684_Discoveri...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jammygit 7y ago

Github issue got closed or removed it looks like. There is a new issue where people are complaining about the first getting closed: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367

Aaronn 7y ago
They were getting a ton of spam messages so they have been locked so that only collaborators can talk. They will be restored when the spam stops https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367#issuecomment-482505988 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/367#issuecom....

cyansmoker 7y ago

I agreed with your comment, until I followed the github link and found that all issues had been removed.