5 ms·

To paraphrase another comment on this; if I have to trust the server for Matrix E2EE to work, why don’t I just use Slack? The whole point of E2EE is so you don’

To paraphrase another comment on this; if I have to trust the server for Matrix E2EE to work, why don’t I just use Slack? The whole point of E2EE is so you don’t have to trust the server. And a “warning” that says something like “your group chat has been compromised by someone with access to the server or it might just be bob bought a new phone” is laughable as a status quo.

Arathorn 4y ago
The point is that if your threat model cares about interception, you have to verify the identity of users out of band - same as Signal or WhatsApp or whatever. Then, if you've done that, and an unverified device is added to the conversation, the warning shows up and explicitly means "your group chat has been compromised" - just like a big red TLS warning on a webpage means "this certificate is bad". It does *NOT* mean that "it might just be bob bought a new phone"; if bob bought a new phone, he'll have verified it when he logged in, and so the warning doesn't show up. Anyone who actually uses Matrix will be familiar with the fact that it's pretty rare to see a big red X on a user who you've verified, and when it happens, you go ping them to ask wtf is going on - much like you'd ping the webmaster of a site whose TLS certificate is bad. This is why the Matrix community is not up in arms about this "vulnerability" - it is literally following the intended design, right from the point that we announced verification back in https://element.io/blog/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/ https://element.io/blog/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-sign.... Now, this design can absolutely be improved on - at the least, we could go back to freezing the room whenever there's an unverified device, forcing the users to decide how to flush out the old device. Or we could switch to TOFU, and block unverified devices by default. But we've chosen to prioritise migrating the clients onto a single E2EE codebase (matrix-rust-sdk-crypto) first, so we do that work in a single place, rather than in quadruplicate across matrix-{js,ios,android,rust}-sdk.
- dodgerdan 4y ago
  > The point is that if your threat model cares about interception, you have to verify the identity of users out of band - same as Signal or WhatsApp or whatever. I’ve read your blog posts and this comment, congratulations it seems to have satisfied most people. Howerver it is NOT the same as Signal. Signal servers cannot just add a device to a group chat. I would challenge you to get one reputable cryptographer to back what you’re claiming about these vulnerabilities and your proposed fixes. To me Matrix isn’t secure, the organizations responses to these disclosures has been poor and the “fixes” weak.
  - Arathorn 4y ago
    You are completely misinterpreting my quote, which makes me question whether you are acting in good faith. Totally agreed that Signal servers cannot just add a device to a group chat. What I saying was: in any system, you have to verify users for security in general. Having verified users in Matrix, you then get a massive red warning if an unverified device is added to their accounts. Given we have cross-signing (i.e. users are heavily encouraged to verify their own devices when they log in), you can be sure that such unverified devices are malicious and take appropriate action. The obvious thing we could do is to go one step further (as we used to, until we backed it out in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3837 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3837) and stop messages from flowing until the unverified device has been dealt with. Even better would be to make group membership controlled by the clients, so the server can't add devices at all. And we're working on this, as part of shifting the implementations over to the audited matrix-rust-sdk-crypto implementation to avoid having to solve the problem in quadruplicate. > I would challenge you to get one reputable cryptographer to back what you’re claiming about these vulnerabilities and your proposed fixes. Hopefully someone will pop up here and confirm that I'm not talking shit :) Failing that, you'll have to wait for the next Least Authority audit - we have another independent public audit queued once this wave of work finishes to address the "To me Matrix isn't secure" polemicists. You can see the last one (on the crypto layer, rather than the group membership layer) at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/16/independent-public-audit-of-vodozemac-a-native-rust-reference-implementation-of-matrix-end-to-end-encryption https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/16/independent-public-audit-... fwiw.
    - cvwright 4y ago
      It’s encouraging to hear that you’re getting an audit of the new approach. Reading over the new design doc for authenticating membership events, and the Github comments, it feels like this is a case for some sort of model checking or automated theorem proving. Manually verifying that the new system does everything we want seems… tough.
      - tptacek 4y ago
- martinralbrecht 4y ago
  A quick comment on this, we did address this in our paper: "In environments where cross-signing and verification are enabled, adding a new unverified user adds a warning to the room to indicate that unverified devices are present. However, it is possible for a homeserver to add a verified user to rooms without changing the security properties of the room. This allows a colluding homeserver and verified user to eavesdrop on rooms not intended for them. In other words, the warning regarding unverified devices is independent to whether the device is intended to participate in the specific room. Finally we note that users may, of course, simply ignore warnings." https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/static/paper.pdf https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/static/paper.pdf
DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
the paper and this design decision by Matrix teams has recently been discussed at length in an SCW podcast (paging Thomas H. Ptacek). One of my fav episodes yet. Very sobering unfortunately. https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/11614796-matrix-with-martin-albrecht-dan-jones https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/...
- Arathorn 4y ago
  All the pointing-and-laughing derision on the podcast seemed pretty toxic, tbh. Rather than all the "oh look how stupid Matrix are" schtick, it might have been even more interesting and informative (and less obnoxious) to get the other viewpoint and understand why we don't consider server-controlled group membership to be catastrophic in practice... as per my explanations elsewhere on the thread. Honestly, this whole thing shows the infosec community at its worst: optimising for sensationalism/drama/press-coverage over constructive criticism and research. And it's particularly grating when the target is a mission-driven non-profit FOSS project, rather than a bungling megacorp vendor or whatever. Meanwhile things like OpenSSL RCEs or even Signal RCEs like https://thehackerblog.com/i-too-like-to-live-dangerously-accidentally-finding-rce-in-signal-desktop-via-html-injection-in-quoted-replies/ https://thehackerblog.com/i-too-like-to-live-dangerously-acc... fly past without the researchers doing the podcast circuit(!)
  - tptacek 4y ago
    By all means, jump on an episode with us, and give us the other side. We're offensive cryptography (in the "offense" vs "defense") people, and have a warm, effusive enthusiasm for offensive research results. It stings to hear enthusiasm about attack research that impacts your project, but that's not the intent, of course. You'd hear exactly the same tone if we were talking about some hypothetical system. Meanwhile, I can't disagree more strongly with your last paragraph. This is a sensational result. It's the most impactful result ever generated against a secure messaging protocol. It deserves whatever attention it can get. To date, I think the Matrix project has been quite effective at diverting attention away from the results. I think you'll find that even non-event OpenSSL vulnerabilities get multiple bites at the HN front page. Every serious OpenSSL vulnerability in the last 10 years has gotten vastly more attention than this research. We do this podcast under our own names, with our own professional reputations attached, and we should all be able to at least agree that we've got a lot invested in those reputations. If we record an episode with the Matrix team giving their side and treat you unfairly, people will hear it, and that will reflect poorly on us. Apart from us just not being, like, monsters, our incentives are also aligned to give you a fair hearing. Let's do an episode where you explain why this isn't as big a deal as we made it out to be! We're game.

Arathorn 4y ago

The point is that if your threat model cares about interception, you have to verify the identity of users out of band - same as Signal or WhatsApp or whatever. Then, if you've done that, and an unverified device is added to the conversation, the warning shows up and explicitly means "your group chat has been compromised" - just like a big red TLS warning on a webpage means "this certificate is bad". It does *NOT* mean that "it might just be bob bought a new phone"; if bob bought a new phone, he'll have verified it when he logged in, and so the warning doesn't show up. Anyone who actually uses Matrix will be familiar with the fact that it's pretty rare to see a big red X on a user who you've verified, and when it happens, you go ping them to ask wtf is going on - much like you'd ping the webmaster of a site whose TLS certificate is bad. This is why the Matrix community is not up in arms about this "vulnerability" - it is literally following the intended design, right from the point that we announced verification back in https://element.io/blog/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-signing-is-here/ https://element.io/blog/e2e-encryption-by-default-cross-sign.... Now, this design can absolutely be improved on - at the least, we could go back to freezing the room whenever there's an unverified device, forcing the users to decide how to flush out the old device. Or we could switch to TOFU, and block unverified devices by default. But we've chosen to prioritise migrating the clients onto a single E2EE codebase (matrix-rust-sdk-crypto) first, so we do that work in a single place, rather than in quadruplicate across matrix-{js,ios,android,rust}-sdk.

dodgerdan 4y ago
> The point is that if your threat model cares about interception, you have to verify the identity of users out of band - same as Signal or WhatsApp or whatever. I’ve read your blog posts and this comment, congratulations it seems to have satisfied most people. Howerver it is NOT the same as Signal. Signal servers cannot just add a device to a group chat. I would challenge you to get one reputable cryptographer to back what you’re claiming about these vulnerabilities and your proposed fixes. To me Matrix isn’t secure, the organizations responses to these disclosures has been poor and the “fixes” weak.
- Arathorn 4y ago
  You are completely misinterpreting my quote, which makes me question whether you are acting in good faith. Totally agreed that Signal servers cannot just add a device to a group chat. What I saying was: in any system, you have to verify users for security in general. Having verified users in Matrix, you then get a massive red warning if an unverified device is added to their accounts. Given we have cross-signing (i.e. users are heavily encouraged to verify their own devices when they log in), you can be sure that such unverified devices are malicious and take appropriate action. The obvious thing we could do is to go one step further (as we used to, until we backed it out in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3837 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3837) and stop messages from flowing until the unverified device has been dealt with. Even better would be to make group membership controlled by the clients, so the server can't add devices at all. And we're working on this, as part of shifting the implementations over to the audited matrix-rust-sdk-crypto implementation to avoid having to solve the problem in quadruplicate. > I would challenge you to get one reputable cryptographer to back what you’re claiming about these vulnerabilities and your proposed fixes. Hopefully someone will pop up here and confirm that I'm not talking shit :) Failing that, you'll have to wait for the next Least Authority audit - we have another independent public audit queued once this wave of work finishes to address the "To me Matrix isn't secure" polemicists. You can see the last one (on the crypto layer, rather than the group membership layer) at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/16/independent-public-audit-of-vodozemac-a-native-rust-reference-implementation-of-matrix-end-to-end-encryption https://matrix.org/blog/2022/05/16/independent-public-audit-... fwiw.
  - cvwright 4y ago
    It’s encouraging to hear that you’re getting an audit of the new approach. Reading over the new design doc for authenticating membership events, and the Github comments, it feels like this is a case for some sort of model checking or automated theorem proving. Manually verifying that the new system does everything we want seems… tough.
    - tptacek 4y ago
martinralbrecht 4y ago
A quick comment on this, we did address this in our paper: "In environments where cross-signing and verification are enabled, adding a new unverified user adds a warning to the room to indicate that unverified devices are present. However, it is possible for a homeserver to add a verified user to rooms without changing the security properties of the room. This allows a colluding homeserver and verified user to eavesdrop on rooms not intended for them. In other words, the warning regarding unverified devices is independent to whether the device is intended to participate in the specific room. Finally we note that users may, of course, simply ignore warnings." https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/static/paper.pdf https://nebuchadnezzar-megolm.github.io/static/paper.pdf

DyslexicAtheist 4y ago

the paper and this design decision by Matrix teams has recently been discussed at length in an SCW podcast (paging Thomas H. Ptacek). One of my fav episodes yet. Very sobering unfortunately. https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/11614796-matrix-with-martin-albrecht-dan-jones https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/...

Arathorn 4y ago
All the pointing-and-laughing derision on the podcast seemed pretty toxic, tbh. Rather than all the "oh look how stupid Matrix are" schtick, it might have been even more interesting and informative (and less obnoxious) to get the other viewpoint and understand why we don't consider server-controlled group membership to be catastrophic in practice... as per my explanations elsewhere on the thread. Honestly, this whole thing shows the infosec community at its worst: optimising for sensationalism/drama/press-coverage over constructive criticism and research. And it's particularly grating when the target is a mission-driven non-profit FOSS project, rather than a bungling megacorp vendor or whatever. Meanwhile things like OpenSSL RCEs or even Signal RCEs like https://thehackerblog.com/i-too-like-to-live-dangerously-accidentally-finding-rce-in-signal-desktop-via-html-injection-in-quoted-replies/ https://thehackerblog.com/i-too-like-to-live-dangerously-acc... fly past without the researchers doing the podcast circuit(!)
- tptacek 4y ago
  By all means, jump on an episode with us, and give us the other side. We're offensive cryptography (in the "offense" vs "defense") people, and have a warm, effusive enthusiasm for offensive research results. It stings to hear enthusiasm about attack research that impacts your project, but that's not the intent, of course. You'd hear exactly the same tone if we were talking about some hypothetical system. Meanwhile, I can't disagree more strongly with your last paragraph. This is a sensational result. It's the most impactful result ever generated against a secure messaging protocol. It deserves whatever attention it can get. To date, I think the Matrix project has been quite effective at diverting attention away from the results. I think you'll find that even non-event OpenSSL vulnerabilities get multiple bites at the HN front page. Every serious OpenSSL vulnerability in the last 10 years has gotten vastly more attention than this research. We do this podcast under our own names, with our own professional reputations attached, and we should all be able to at least agree that we've got a lot invested in those reputations. If we record an episode with the Matrix team giving their side and treat you unfairly, people will hear it, and that will reflect poorly on us. Apart from us just not being, like, monsters, our incentives are also aligned to give you a fair hearing. Let's do an episode where you explain why this isn't as big a deal as we made it out to be! We're game.