4 ms·

Riot/Matrix enables cross-signed verification and E2E encryption by default

39 points by Arathorn 7y ago

jooize 7y ago
Awesome! Thank you all for making Matrix and Riot a user-friendly and trustable messaging platform. > Finally, we no longer nag and block messages even when an unverified session appears in a conversation - the user’s shield going red is your cue to warn you that badness may be happening. As with dialogue boxes stealing focus, without mitigation, not warning exposes me to a window of risk when an unverified session appears around the moment I'm sending a message. Assuming there is zero latency of the shield, being human I can anyway not expect to react in time and abort my sending of the message to the potentially adversarial session. If a new session appears and I submit a message within a time period (to be determined), I need some form of mitigation to prevent sending that to the new untrusted session. An immediate idea is to send to all except the new session(s), and ask about sending to the new. That would avoid interrupting the flow of the writer.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  mm, that could be a nice solution.
svtiger 7y ago
Soo proud of the Matrix Team!!! You are doing great work! Thanks for the transparency and doing your best to implement this protocol. Can only imagine the moving pieces and hard work to get this right. I've had the pleasure of meeting some of the core team and they are some of the smartest and humblest people. Looking forward to the realization of a unified and open messaging/communication layer with the help of your thoughtful effort. This work may sometimes be thankless. But here to say the community appreciates you all; including all the open source contributors working on the clients, server implementations, and supporting software (bridges, extensions, bots)!!
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Thank you - the thanks is hugely appreciated; E2EE-by-default has been a never-ending project with a lot of moving parts, and given the end result is basically invisible if successful, and the enormous blogpost is a bit indigestible, it's really nice to hear the encouragement and positive feedback. Thank you for believing in Matrix and supporting us!!
  - svtiger 7y ago
    You and your team deserve it and much more!! Actually love how you put things in one place. The API documentation is a good example. Rather not have to search around and go from page-to-page searching for things; feels like a feature to me;) This is what I'm talking about. Responsive communication from all levels. And not just because it's HN and "like we gotta look good now because we announced something." Responsiveness has be consistent and the baseline throughout my involvement with Matrix as an organization and a community. Also really appreciated the full workup on the latest release. Know with developing like 15+ applications is hard enough, getting information out to the community in a thorough way is such a heavy burden on top of all the other work going on. Few questions -- Any timeline on when: * account-password/backup-key-passphrase will be consolidated (end-of-summer possibly -- fingers crossed); * ‘trust on first use’ (TOFU) will be integrated; Think those two features will be important for improving UX. Also, encrypted search via Seshat: Simply, YESSS!!
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      :) So, cryptographic login (i.e. consolidating login password and recovery passphrase) is a fairly challenging task, which is why we descoped it from E2EE-by-default. For instance, we need to make sure we don't break clients which don't want to do cryptographic login (e.g. Riot single-sign-on, or those who don't support E2EE). We also need to make sure that users can reset and rotate their passwords without losing their E2EE history. We'd also have to completely rewrite the registration/login process in Riot (again). We can't commit to timings on it, but based on the feedback from E2EE-by-default it'll be pretty high on the todo list. TOFU is much easier, and hopefully we can sort it out as part of incremental fixes having now gone live. We almost snuck it in before release, but it'd have pushed things out even further. https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/12719 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/12719 is the bug to follow here. But yup, these will be the difference between today's 1.0 and an (even) better UX.
myu701 7y ago
Between this announcement, reading the deep dive, catching the "this Week in Matrix", and the work of the creator of Mistborn, my tech-support-coerced family Signal groups are soon going to have their days numbered. Bravo Matrix contributors! This work in my mind is as close as we can get to the golden days of Pidgin being able to talk to everything and everyone, and having E2EE default is a must-have these days. So amazing to watch the progress of this from 'a few HN talking heads' to 'hundreds of contributors and dedicated staff'. While Matrix will feel less secure than Signal since the feature just landed, having the E2EE data be self-hosted, federation-possible, and support multiple clients, removable-users-from-groups, and other features Signal is working on but tight-lipped about, means the trade off is increasingly trending towards worth the cost of migration to another client. Matrix is just so much more collaborative and less authoritarian than Signal. Don't get me wrong, I currently use Signal above all others, DMs, groups, calls, the works. But the cloak and dagger radio silence, reticence to accept PRs, and lack of even basic documentation to self-host your own Signal server do eventually leave me with a sense that, while I'm glad for free access to this most-secure-for-my-use-case software, even free apps on phones and desktop could be improved.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

39 points by Arathorn 7y ago

Awesome! Thank you all for making Matrix and Riot a user-friendly and trustable messaging platform. > Finally, we no longer nag and block messages even when an unverified session appears in a conversation - the user’s shield going red is your cue to warn you that badness may be happening. As with dialogue boxes stealing focus, without mitigation, not warning exposes me to a window of risk when an unverified session appears around the moment I'm sending a message. Assuming there is zero latency of the shield, being human I can anyway not expect to react in time and abort my sending of the message to the potentially adversarial session. If a new session appears and I submit a message within a time period (to be determined), I need some form of mitigation to prevent sending that to the new untrusted session. An immediate idea is to send to all except the new session(s), and ask about sending to the new. That would avoid interrupting the flow of the writer.

Arathorn 7y ago
mm, that could be a nice solution.

svtiger 7y ago

Soo proud of the Matrix Team!!! You are doing great work! Thanks for the transparency and doing your best to implement this protocol. Can only imagine the moving pieces and hard work to get this right. I've had the pleasure of meeting some of the core team and they are some of the smartest and humblest people. Looking forward to the realization of a unified and open messaging/communication layer with the help of your thoughtful effort. This work may sometimes be thankless. But here to say the community appreciates you all; including all the open source contributors working on the clients, server implementations, and supporting software (bridges, extensions, bots)!!

Arathorn 7y ago
Thank you - the thanks is hugely appreciated; E2EE-by-default has been a never-ending project with a lot of moving parts, and given the end result is basically invisible if successful, and the enormous blogpost is a bit indigestible, it's really nice to hear the encouragement and positive feedback. Thank you for believing in Matrix and supporting us!!
- svtiger 7y ago
  You and your team deserve it and much more!! Actually love how you put things in one place. The API documentation is a good example. Rather not have to search around and go from page-to-page searching for things; feels like a feature to me;) This is what I'm talking about. Responsive communication from all levels. And not just because it's HN and "like we gotta look good now because we announced something." Responsiveness has be consistent and the baseline throughout my involvement with Matrix as an organization and a community. Also really appreciated the full workup on the latest release. Know with developing like 15+ applications is hard enough, getting information out to the community in a thorough way is such a heavy burden on top of all the other work going on. Few questions -- Any timeline on when: * account-password/backup-key-passphrase will be consolidated (end-of-summer possibly -- fingers crossed); * ‘trust on first use’ (TOFU) will be integrated; Think those two features will be important for improving UX. Also, encrypted search via Seshat: Simply, YESSS!!
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    :) So, cryptographic login (i.e. consolidating login password and recovery passphrase) is a fairly challenging task, which is why we descoped it from E2EE-by-default. For instance, we need to make sure we don't break clients which don't want to do cryptographic login (e.g. Riot single-sign-on, or those who don't support E2EE). We also need to make sure that users can reset and rotate their passwords without losing their E2EE history. We'd also have to completely rewrite the registration/login process in Riot (again). We can't commit to timings on it, but based on the feedback from E2EE-by-default it'll be pretty high on the todo list. TOFU is much easier, and hopefully we can sort it out as part of incremental fixes having now gone live. We almost snuck it in before release, but it'd have pushed things out even further. https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/12719 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/12719 is the bug to follow here. But yup, these will be the difference between today's 1.0 and an (even) better UX.

myu701 7y ago

Between this announcement, reading the deep dive, catching the "this Week in Matrix", and the work of the creator of Mistborn, my tech-support-coerced family Signal groups are soon going to have their days numbered. Bravo Matrix contributors! This work in my mind is as close as we can get to the golden days of Pidgin being able to talk to everything and everyone, and having E2EE default is a must-have these days. So amazing to watch the progress of this from 'a few HN talking heads' to 'hundreds of contributors and dedicated staff'. While Matrix will feel less secure than Signal since the feature just landed, having the E2EE data be self-hosted, federation-possible, and support multiple clients, removable-users-from-groups, and other features Signal is working on but tight-lipped about, means the trade off is increasingly trending towards worth the cost of migration to another client. Matrix is just so much more collaborative and less authoritarian than Signal. Don't get me wrong, I currently use Signal above all others, DMs, groups, calls, the works. But the cloak and dagger radio silence, reticence to accept PRs, and lack of even basic documentation to self-host your own Signal server do eventually leave me with a sense that, while I'm glad for free access to this most-secure-for-my-use-case software, even free apps on phones and desktop could be improved.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]