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If a homeserver adds a fake device to an existing user of a room, the default behaviour of Matrix clients is to implicitly trust that device and send new messag
by cyphar 1y ago
If a homeserver adds a fake device to an existing user of a room, the default behaviour of Matrix clients is to implicitly trust that device and send new messages to it. So any homeserver used by any user in a room could read future messages transparently and without any indication to the user that this is happening (unless all users in the room have opted-in to the "do not send to untrusted devices" knob).
This defeats the entire point of end-to-end encryption. The entire point is that you shouldn't have to trust intermediary servers. If Matrix clients had a giant red flashing warning if you disabled the "do not send to untrusted devices" knob, then maybe this would be excusable -- but they don't and it is off by default.
- Arathorn 1y agoUgh, yes - i'd made the mental leap that https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/2700 https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/2700 had finished rolling out, whereas it looks like it's now delayed until October due to having to wait for the ecosystem to catch up. my bad.
- cyphar 1y agoTo be clear -- I am very glad that this issue is finally being resolved after such a long time. I just wish that there had been a larger warning about it from the start (especially once E2EE stopped being marked as experimental).