Matrix notes

I have some concerns about Matrix (the protocol, not the movie that came out recently, although I do have concerns about that as well). I’ve been watching the project for a long time, and it seems more a promising alternative to many protocols like IRC, XMPP, and Signal.

One of my main concerns with Matrix is data retention, which is a key part of security in a threat model where (for example) an hostile state actor wants to surveil your communications and can seize your devices.

On IRC, servers don’t actually keep messages all that long: they pass them along to other servers and clients as fast as they can, only keep them in memory, and move on to the next message. There are no concerns about data retention on messages (and their metadata) other than the network layer. (I’m ignoring the issues with user registration, which is a separate, if valid, concern.) Obviously, an hostile server could log everything passing through it, but IRC federations are normally tightly controlled. So, if you trust your IRC operators, you should be fairly safe. Obviously, clients can (and often do, even if OTR is configured!) log all messages, but this is generally not the default. Irssi, for example, does not log by default. IRC bouncers are more likely to log to disk, of course, to be able to do what they do.

Compare this to Matrix: when you send a message to a Matrix homeserver, that server first stores it in its internal SQL database. Then it will transmit that message to all clients connected to that server and room, and to all other servers that have clients connected to that room. Those remote servers, in turn, will keep a copy of that message and all its metadata in their own database, by default forever. On encrypted rooms those messages are encrypted, but not their metadata.

There is a mechanism to expire entries in Synapse, but it is not enabled by default. So one should generally assume that a message sent on Matrix is never expired.

Anarcat