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> And in general I trust and know that decisions with the spec are being made carefully. This is one place where I strongly disagree. Almost all features have

> And in general I trust and know that decisions with the spec are being made carefully. This is one place where I strongly disagree. Almost all features have "We will add encryption later" which is not a way to build a secure messenger. Stickers, polls, profiles, spaces, relations, reactions... they all start with and unencrypted version with the promise that "encryption will come in a later MSC". They should really take "secure" out of the tagline until they actually add E2EE for all of these features. Basically all clients allow users to use these insecure features in encrypted rooms with no warning at all. And I constantly see hacky quick fixes get accepted because "we need to do something", "no clear use case for $X" (even when there is) and "N other MSCs depend on this so we'll merge it in and deal with a proper solution later". For example the relations MSC just got merged with support for only 1 relation per message even though it is clear that editing replies would be a problem with this system. I love Matrix and hope it does in fact unify messaging but I think "carefully" is not the way to describe how the spec is progressing. More like "shoved in whatever direction is needed to implement the newest Element feature". Maybe that is for the better, we do need a featureful protocol to get users after all, but personally it irks me the wrong way. Especially when security and privacy are ignored "for later".

Arathorn 5y ago
This is a really interesting point. We deliberately built Element to help prove the spec and define its direction (including ensuring it has decent privacy properties), to avoid all the failure modes where folks build a protocol without a real app or product in mind and end up with something which tried to be all things to all people and useful to none. While I’d have loved us to have infite manpower getting all the security features in from day 1, we had to bootstrap and we prioritised usable apps over optimising for a perfect spec. And judging by some of the rest of the thread, we didn’t so well even then; it would have been even worse otherwise.
- kevincox 5y ago
  I think it is helpful to have Element to test out the spec. I think the problem is that the "bar" for accepting features is too low for my taste. > While I’d have loved us to have infite manpower getting all the security features in from day 1, we had to bootstrap and we prioritised usable apps over optimising for a perfect spec. I get the decision. But it leaves a sour taste in my mouth that Matrix advertises itself as "secure" but almost any user is leaking sensitive information without knowing. I suspect that 95% of users would be surprised if you told them about the number of things that leak in E2EE rooms. Probably the better approach would have been to skip pushing E2EE as the default, and disable all insecure features in Element for E2EE rooms (or have an explicit opt-in). The marketing team would hate this approach but it least it is honest and safe.
  - Arathorn 5y ago
    There isn’t a marketing team for Matrix, unless you count me & the dev advocacy team. I actually have another (big) blog post called Metadata And Matrix which attempts to enumerate the privacy properties we have today to try to educate everyone, and how we’re improving it in future - will post it shortly. Agreed it could be better, but if you’re on your own server you are in a pretty good place.
    - twicetwice 5y ago
      I want to voice strong agreement with kevincox. I use an encrypted Matrix room daily and had no idea that reactions, relations (does that mean that edits are in cleartext??), etc are completely unencrypted. I've read a little bit of the spec (though clearly not very much), I've written a bot, I've patched the Element desktop client, I've even been working with a JSON export of my message history and didn't notice—perhaps I should have, but my point is that it's not obvious at all, and users SHOULD be proactively made aware of what's encrypted and what's not. Sending things unencrypted that users have every reason to think are encrypted is extremely irresponsible. And I assumed, as I think is perfectly reasonable, that everything in an E2EE room is in fact end-to-end encrypted. I'm very disappointed to find out this way that it's not (and won't be for the foreseeable future), and I don't see any justification for failing to making users aware of that. All that said, I love Matrix, will continue to use it every day, and am hugely rooting for the success of the project. Thanks for all your hard work on it!
      - Arathorn 5y ago
        Is it really that surprising that the act of reacting to a message with an emoji isn't E2EE, given the server needs to count the number of reactions? One could encrypt the emoji itself, but it doesn't seem like a massively sensitive datapoint in its own right. (That said, we will encrypt them eventually, but it's just not very high priority given the fact it doesn't practically feel very high impact, relative to all the other things we could be doing to improve Matrix).
        5y ago

Arathorn 5y ago

This is a really interesting point. We deliberately built Element to help prove the spec and define its direction (including ensuring it has decent privacy properties), to avoid all the failure modes where folks build a protocol without a real app or product in mind and end up with something which tried to be all things to all people and useful to none. While I’d have loved us to have infite manpower getting all the security features in from day 1, we had to bootstrap and we prioritised usable apps over optimising for a perfect spec. And judging by some of the rest of the thread, we didn’t so well even then; it would have been even worse otherwise.

kevincox 5y ago
I think it is helpful to have Element to test out the spec. I think the problem is that the "bar" for accepting features is too low for my taste. > While I’d have loved us to have infite manpower getting all the security features in from day 1, we had to bootstrap and we prioritised usable apps over optimising for a perfect spec. I get the decision. But it leaves a sour taste in my mouth that Matrix advertises itself as "secure" but almost any user is leaking sensitive information without knowing. I suspect that 95% of users would be surprised if you told them about the number of things that leak in E2EE rooms. Probably the better approach would have been to skip pushing E2EE as the default, and disable all insecure features in Element for E2EE rooms (or have an explicit opt-in). The marketing team would hate this approach but it least it is honest and safe.
- Arathorn 5y ago
  There isn’t a marketing team for Matrix, unless you count me & the dev advocacy team. I actually have another (big) blog post called Metadata And Matrix which attempts to enumerate the privacy properties we have today to try to educate everyone, and how we’re improving it in future - will post it shortly. Agreed it could be better, but if you’re on your own server you are in a pretty good place.
  - twicetwice 5y ago
    I want to voice strong agreement with kevincox. I use an encrypted Matrix room daily and had no idea that reactions, relations (does that mean that edits are in cleartext??), etc are completely unencrypted. I've read a little bit of the spec (though clearly not very much), I've written a bot, I've patched the Element desktop client, I've even been working with a JSON export of my message history and didn't notice—perhaps I should have, but my point is that it's not obvious at all, and users SHOULD be proactively made aware of what's encrypted and what's not. Sending things unencrypted that users have every reason to think are encrypted is extremely irresponsible. And I assumed, as I think is perfectly reasonable, that everything in an E2EE room is in fact end-to-end encrypted. I'm very disappointed to find out this way that it's not (and won't be for the foreseeable future), and I don't see any justification for failing to making users aware of that. All that said, I love Matrix, will continue to use it every day, and am hugely rooting for the success of the project. Thanks for all your hard work on it!
    - Arathorn 5y ago
      Is it really that surprising that the act of reacting to a message with an emoji isn't E2EE, given the server needs to count the number of reactions? One could encrypt the emoji itself, but it doesn't seem like a massively sensitive datapoint in its own right. (That said, we will encrypt them eventually, but it's just not very high priority given the fact it doesn't practically feel very high impact, relative to all the other things we could be doing to improve Matrix).
      - 5y ago