Synapse 1.15.0 release day folks.

We continue our push to improve performance across the board. Factoring out event persistence into a separate worker pointed the way to a host of small but collectively important improvements. Expect further changes in coming releases.

Aside from that the admin API continues to grow (this time device management) and we have improved device list syncing to aid e2ee reliability.

We are receiving an increasing number of high quality PRs from the community, please keep them coming. Special thanks to cg505, dklimpel, WGH, olof and ilmari

Get 1.15.0 from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since v1.14.0

Synapse 1.15.0 (2020-06-11)

No significant changes.

Synapse 1.15.0rc1 (2020-06-09)

Features

• Advertise support for Client-Server API r0.6.0 and remove related unstable feature flags. (#6585)
• Add an option to disable autojoining rooms for guest accounts. (#6637)
• For SAML authentication, add the ability to pass email addresses to be added to new users' accounts via SAML attributes. Contributed by Christopher Cooper. (#7385)
• Add admin APIs to allow server admins to manage users' devices. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7481)
• Add support for generating thumbnails for WebP images. Previously, users would see an empty box instead of preview image. Contributed by @WGH-. (#7586)
• Support the standardized m.login.sso user-interactive authentication flow. (#7630)

Bugfixes

• Allow new users to be registered via the admin API even if the monthly active user limit has been reached. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7263)
• Fix email notifications not being enabled for new users when created via the Admin API. (#7267)
• Fix str placeholders in an instance of PrepareDatabaseException. Introduced in Synapse v1.8.0. (#7575)
• Fix a bug in automatic user creation during first time login with m.login.jwt. Regression in v1.6.0. Contributed by @olof. (#7585)
• Fix a bug causing the cross-signing keys to be ignored when resyncing a device list. (#7594)
• Fix metrics failing when there is a large number of active background processes. (#7597)
• Fix bug where returning rooms for a group would fail if it included a room that the server was not in. (#7599)
• Fix duplicate key violation when persisting read markers. (#7607)
• Prevent an entire iteration of the device list resync loop from failing if one server responds with a malformed result. (#7609)
• Fix exceptions when fetching events from a remote host fails. (#7622)
• Make synctl restart start synapse if it wasn't running. (#7624)
• Pass device information through to the login endpoint when using the login fallback. (#7629)
• Advertise the m.login.token login flow when OpenID Connect is enabled. (#7631)
• Fix bug in account data replication stream. (#7656)

Improved Documentation

• Update the OpenBSD installation instructions. (#7587)
• Advertise Python 3.8 support in setup.py. (#7602)
• Add a link to #synapse:matrix.org in the troubleshooting section of the README. (#7603)
• Clarifications to the admin api documentation. (#7647)

Internal Changes

• Convert the identity handler to async/await. (#7561)
• Improve query performance for fetching state from a PostgreSQL database. Contributed by @ilmari. (#7567)
• Speed up processing of federation stream RDATA rows. (#7584)
• Add comment to systemd example to show postgresql dependency. (#7591)
• Refactor Ratelimiter to limit the amount of expensive config value accesses. (#7595)
• Convert groups handlers to async/await. (#7600)
• Clean up exception handling in SAML2ResponseResource. (#7614)
• Check that all asynchronous tasks succeed and general cleanup of MonthlyActiveUsersTestCase and TestMauLimit. (#7619)
• Convert get_user_id_by_threepid to async/await. (#7620)
• Switch to upstream dh-virtualenv rather than our fork for Debian package builds. (#7621)
• Update CI scripts to check the number in the newsfile fragment. (#7623)
• Check if the localpart of a Matrix ID is reserved for guest users earlier in the registration flow, as well as when responding to requests to /register/available. (#7625)
• Minor cleanups to OpenID Connect integration. (#7628)
• Attempt to fix flaky test: PhoneHomeStatsTestCase.test_performance_100. (#7634)
• Fix typos of m.olm.curve25519-aes-sha2 and m.megolm.v1.aes-sha2 in comments, test files. (#7637)
• Convert user directory, state deltas, and stats handlers to async/await. (#7640)
• Remove some unused constants. (#7644)
• Fix type information on assert_*_is_admin methods. (#7645)
• Convert registration handler to async/await. (#7649)

Synapse 1.14.0 has landed.

This release contains OpenId Connect support, so that admins can configure a whole range of SSO options. We're really excited about what this means for helping users sign up and are considering it for matrix.org.

1.14.0 also contains finer grained cache configuration support, so that admins can tune caches in a more granular way. Our experience is that cache tuning can make a big difference to Synapse performance and over time we hope to continue improving cache tooling. Potentially we could even have caches auto-tune.

You'll also find support for rooms v6. v6 contains some small but important changes to improve the security of the room model. As with all room version upgrades we can't switch to v6 as the default version immediately since we need to build up a critical mass of servers that can support it. So upgrade and watch this space for when we switch over properly.

As an aside we continue to be very happy with using Redis for worker inter-communication and will likely recommend it for production use in the coming weeks.

Get 1.14.0 from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since v1.13.0

Synapse 1.14.0 (2020-05-28)

No significant changes.

Synapse 1.14.0rc2 (2020-05-27)

Bugfixes

• Fix cache config to not apply cache factor to event cache. Regression in v1.14.0rc1. (#7578)
• Fix bug where ReplicationStreamer was not always started when replication was enabled. Bug introduced in v1.14.0rc1. (#7579)
• Fix specifying individual cache factors for caches with special characters in their name. Regression in v1.14.0rc1. (#7580)

Improved Documentation

• Fix the OIDC client_auth_method value in the sample config. (#7581)

Synapse 1.14.0rc1 (2020-05-26)

Features

• Synapse's cache factor can now be configured in homeserver.yaml by the caches.global_factor setting. Additionally, caches.per_cache_factors controls the cache factors for individual caches. (#6391)
• Add OpenID Connect login/registration support. Contributed by Quentin Gliech, on behalf of les Connecteurs. (#7256, #7457)
• Add room details admin endpoint. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#7317)
• Allow for using more than one spam checker module at once. (#7435)
• Add additional authentication checks for m.room.power_levels event per MSC2209. (#7502)
• Implement room version 6 per MSC2240. (#7506)
• Add highly experimental option to move event persistence off master. (#7281, #7374, #7436, #7440, #7475, #7490, #7491, #7492, #7493, #7495, #7515, #7516, #7517, #7542)

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug where event updates might not be sent over replication to worker processes after the stream falls behind. (#7384)
• Allow expired user accounts to log out their device sessions. (#7443)
• Fix a bug that would cause Synapse not to resync out-of-sync device lists. (#7453)
• Prevent rooms with 0 members or with invalid version strings from breaking group queries. (#7465)
• Workaround for an upstream Twisted bug that caused Synapse to become unresponsive after startup. (#7473)
• Fix Redis reconnection logic that can result in missed updates over replication if master reconnects to Redis without restarting. (#7482)
• When sending m.room.member events, omit displayname and avatar_url if they aren't set instead of setting them to null. Contributed by Aaron Raimist. (#7497)
• Fix incorrect method label on synapse_http_matrixfederationclient_{requests,responses} prometheus metrics. (#7503)
• Ignore incoming presence events from other homeservers if presence is disabled locally. (#7508)
• Fix a long-standing bug that broke the update remote profile background process. (#7511)
• Hash passwords as early as possible during password reset. (#7538)
• Fix bug where a local user leaving a room could fail under rare circumstances. (#7548)
• Fix "Missing RelayState parameter" error when using user interactive authentication with SAML for some SAML providers. (#7552)
• Fix exception 'GenericWorkerReplicationHandler' object has no attribute 'send_federation_ack', introduced in v1.13.0. (#7564)
• synctl now warns if it was unable to stop Synapse and will not attempt to start Synapse if nothing was stopped. Contributed by Romain Bouyé. (#6590)

Updates to the Docker image

• Update docker runtime image to Alpine v3.11. Contributed by @Starbix. (#7398)

Improved Documentation

• Update information about mapping providers for SAML and OpenID. (#7458)
• Add additional reverse proxy example for Caddy v2. Contributed by Jeff Peeler. (#7463)
• Fix copy-paste error in ServerNoticesConfig docstring. Contributed by @ptman. (#7477)
• Improve the formatting of reverse_proxy.md. (#7514)
• Change the systemd worker service to check that the worker config file exists instead of silently failing. Contributed by David Vo. (#7528)
• Minor clarifications to the TURN docs. (#7533)

Internal Changes

• Add typing annotations in synapse.federation. (#7382)
• Convert the room handler to async/await. (#7396)
• Improve performance of get_e2e_cross_signing_key. (#7428)
• Improve performance of mark_as_sent_devices_by_remote. (#7429, #7562)
• Add type hints to the SAML handler. (#7445)
• Remove storage method get_hosts_in_room that is no longer called anywhere. (#7448)
• Fix some typos in the notice_expiry templates. (#7449)
• Convert the federation handler to async/await. (#7459)
• Convert the search handler to async/await. (#7460)
• Add type hints to synapse.event_auth. (#7505)
• Convert the room member handler to async/await. (#7507)
• Add type hints to room member handler. (#7513)
• Fix typing annotations in tests.replication. (#7518)
• Remove some redundant Python 2 support code. (#7519)
• All endpoints now respond with a 200 OK for OPTIONS requests. (#7534, #7560)
• Synapse now exports detailed allocator statistics and basic GC timings as Prometheus metrics (pypy_gc_time_seconds_total and pypy_memory_bytes) when run under PyPy. Contributed by Ivan Shapovalov. (#7536)
• Remove Ubuntu Cosmic and Disco from the list of distributions which we provide .debs for, due to end-of-life. (#7539)
• Make worker processes return a stubbed-out response to GET /presence requests. (#7545)
• Optimise some references to hs.config. (#7546)
• On upgrade room only send canonical alias once. (#7547)
• Fix some indentation inconsistencies in the sample config. (#7550)
• Include synapse.http.site in type checking. (#7553)
• Fix some test code to not mangle stacktraces, to make it easier to debug errors. (#7554)
• Refresh apt cache when building dh_virtualenv docker image. (#7555)
• Stop logging some expected HTTP request errors as exceptions. (#7556, #7563)
• Convert sending mail to async/await. (#7557)
• Simplify reap_monthly_active_users. (#7558)

Synapse 1.13.0 is here and it's a whopper!

Highlights include new support for User Interactive Authentication (UIA) for Single Sign-on (SSO) installations. This means that for the first time features that require the user to re-authenticate are available for servers that authenticate by SSO. Notably this means that these servers now support cross signing!

SSO admins should take a look at the SSO notes in the changelog.

We have been working hard on performance for large scale installations. Anyone supporting more than a few thousand users is probably running Synapse in worker mode. This means splitting out functionality from the master process and making use of multiple cores (or machines) to spread the load. Cross process communication was previously handled by a home grown TCP based replication protocol. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve performance we have replaced this replication system with Redis and have been running Redis in production on matrix.org for the past 2 weeks.

Redis itself does not provide a significant performance win directly but it means that it is much less expensive to add new workers to a cluster. The topology of the old system meant that every additional worker carried a small but not insignificant overhead to the master process. Since moving to Redis we have doubled the number of workers backing matrix.org.

We still consider Redis to be experimental and admins should not feel obliged to upgrade. However it looks very promising and we are likely to deprecate the old replication system in future. So watch this space - Redis is the future.

Finally we've seen lots of improvements to our documentation and many thanks for those in the community making contributions in this area.

It is also worth noting for those of you contributing to Synapse that the develop branch is now the default. More details in the changelog, so take a look.

Get 1.13.0 from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since v1.12.4

Synapse 1.13.0 (2020-05-19)

This release brings some potential changes necessary for certain configurations of Synapse:

• If your Synapse is configured to use SSO and have a custom sso_redirect_confirm_template_dir configuration option set, you will need to duplicate the new sso_auth_confirm.html, sso_auth_success.html and sso_account_deactivated.html templates into that directory.
• Synapse plugins using the complete_sso_login method of synapse.module_api.ModuleApi should instead switch to the async/await version, complete_sso_login_async, which includes additional checks. The former version is now deprecated.
• A bug was introduced in Synapse 1.4.0 which could cause the room directory to be incomplete or empty if Synapse was upgraded directly from v1.2.1 or earlier, to versions between v1.4.0 and v1.12.x.

Please review UPGRADE.rst for more details on these changes and for general upgrade guidance.

Notice of change to the default git branch for Synapse

With the release of Synapse 1.13.0, the default git branch for Synapse has changed to develop, which is the development tip. This is more consistent with common practice and modern git usage.

The master branch, which tracks the latest release, is still available. It is recommended that developers and distributors who have scripts which run builds using the default branch of Synapse should therefore consider pinning their scripts to master.

Features

• Extend the web_client_location option to accept an absolute URL to use as a redirect. Adds a warning when running the web client on the same hostname as homeserver. Contributed by Martin Milata. (#7006)
• Set Referrer-Policy header to no-referrer on media downloads. (#7009)
• Add support for running replication over Redis when using workers. (#7040, #7325, #7352, #7401, #7427, #7439, #7446, #7450, #7454)
• Admin API POST /_synapse/admin/v1/join/<roomIdOrAlias> to join users to a room like auto_join_rooms for creation of users. (#7051)
• Add options to prevent users from changing their profile or associated 3PIDs. (#7096)
• Support SSO in the user interactive authentication workflow. (#7102, #7186, #7279, #7343)
• Allow server admins to define and enforce a password policy (MSC2000). (#7118)
• Improve the support for SSO authentication on the login fallback page. (#7152, #7235)
• Always whitelist the login fallback in the SSO configuration if public_baseurl is set. (#7153)
• Admin users are no longer required to be in a room to create an alias for it. (#7191)
• Require admin privileges to enable room encryption by default. This does not affect existing rooms. (#7230)
• Add a config option for specifying the value of the Accept-Language HTTP header when generating URL previews. (#7265)
• Allow /requestToken endpoints to hide the existence (or lack thereof) of 3PID associations on the homeserver. (#7315)
• Add a configuration setting to tweak the threshold for dummy events. (#7422)

Bugfixes

• Don't attempt to use an invalid sqlite config if no database configuration is provided. Contributed by @nekatak. (#6573)
• Fix single-sign on with CAS systems: pass the same service URL when requesting the CAS ticket and when calling the proxyValidate URL. Contributed by @Naugrimm. (#6634)
• Fix missing field default when fetching user-defined push rules. (#6639)
• Improve error responses when accessing remote public room lists. (#6899, #7368)
• Transfer alias mappings on room upgrade. (#6946)
• Ensure that a user interactive authentication session is tied to a single request. (#7068, #7455)
• Fix a bug in the federation API which could cause occasional "Failed to get PDU" errors. (#7089)
• Return the proper error (M_BAD_ALIAS) when a non-existent canonical alias is provided. (#7109)
• Fix a bug which meant that groups updates were not correctly replicated between workers. (#7117)
• Fix starting workers when federation sending not split out. (#7133)
• Ensure is_verified is a boolean in responses to GET /_matrix/client/r0/room_keys/keys. Also warn the user if they forgot the version query param. (#7150)
• Fix error page being shown when a custom SAML handler attempted to redirect when processing an auth response. (#7151)
• Avoid importing sqlite3 when using the postgres backend. Contributed by David Vo. (#7155)
• Fix excessive CPU usage by prune_old_outbound_device_pokes job. (#7159)
• Fix a bug which could cause outbound federation traffic to stop working if a client uploaded an incorrect e2e device signature. (#7177)
• Fix a bug which could cause incorrect 'cyclic dependency' error. (#7178)
• Fix a bug that could cause a user to be invited to a server notices (aka System Alerts) room without any notice being sent. (#7199)
• Fix some worker-mode replication handling not being correctly recorded in CPU usage stats. (#7203)
• Do not allow a deactivated user to login via SSO. (#7240, #7259)
• Fix --help command-line argument. (#7249)
• Fix room publish permissions not being checked on room creation. (#7260)
• Reject unknown session IDs during user interactive authentication instead of silently creating a new session. (#7268)
• Fix a SQL query introduced in Synapse 1.12.0 which could cause large amounts of logging to the postgres slow-query log. (#7274)
• Persist user interactive authentication sessions across workers and Synapse restarts. (#7302)
• Fixed backwards compatibility logic of the first value of trusted_third_party_id_servers being used for account_threepid_delegates.email, which occurs when the former, deprecated option is set and the latter is not. (#7316)
• Fix a bug where event updates might not be sent over replication to worker processes after the stream falls behind. (#7337, #7358)
• Fix bad error handling that would cause Synapse to crash if it's provided with a YAML configuration file that's either empty or doesn't parse into a key-value map. (#7341)
• Fix incorrect metrics reporting for renew_attestations background task. (#7344)
• Prevent non-federating rooms from appearing in responses to federated POST /publicRoom requests when a filter was included. (#7367)
• Fix a bug which would cause the room directory to be incorrectly populated if Synapse was upgraded directly from v1.2.1 or earlier to v1.4.0 or later. Note that this fix does not apply retrospectively; see the upgrade notes for more information. (#7387)
• Fix bug in EventContext.deserialize. (#7393)
• Fix a long-standing bug which could cause messages not to be sent over federation, when state events with state keys matching user IDs (such as custom user statuses) were received. (#7376)
• Restore compatibility with non-compliant clients during the user interactive authentication process, fixing a problem introduced in v1.13.0rc1. (#7483)
• Hash passwords as early as possible during registration. (#7523)

Improved Documentation

• Update Debian installation instructions to recommend installing the virtualenv package instead of python3-virtualenv. (#6892)
• Improve the documentation for database configuration. (#6988)
• Improve the documentation of application service configuration files. (#7091)
• Update pre-built package name for FreeBSD. (#7107)
• Update postgres docs with login troubleshooting information. (#7119)
• Clean up INSTALL.md a bit. (#7141)
• Add documentation for running a local CAS server for testing. (#7147)
• Improve README.md by being explicit about public IP recommendation for TURN relaying. (#7167)
• Fix a small typo in the metrics_flags config option. (#7171)
• Update the contributed documentation on managing synapse workers with systemd, and bring it into the core distribution. (#7234)
• Add documentation to the password_providers config option. Add known password provider implementations to docs. (#7238, #7248)
• Modify suggested nginx reverse proxy configuration to match Synapse's default file upload size. Contributed by @ProCycleDev. (#7251)
• Documentation of media_storage_providers options updated to avoid misunderstandings. Contributed by Tristan Lins. (#7272)
• Add documentation on monitoring workers with Prometheus. (#7357)
• Clarify endpoint usage in the users admin api documentation. (#7361)

Deprecations and Removals

• Remove nonfunctional captcha_bypass_secret option from homeserver.yaml. (#7137)

Internal Changes

• Add benchmarks for LruCache. (#6446)
• Return total number of users and profile attributes in admin users endpoint. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#6881)
• Change device list streams to have one row per ID. (#7010)
• Remove concept of a non-limited stream. (#7011)
• Move catchup of replication streams logic to worker. (#7024, #7195, #7226, #7239, #7286, #7290, #7318, #7326, #7378, #7421)
• Convert some of synapse.rest.media to async/await. (#7110, #7184, #7241)
• De-duplicate / remove unused REST code for login and auth. (#7115)
• Convert *StreamRow classes to inner classes. (#7116)
• Clean up some LoggingContext code. (#7120, #7181, #7183, #7408, #7426)
• Add explicit instance_id for USER_SYNC commands and remove implicit conn_id usage. (#7128)
• Refactored the CAS authentication logic to a separate class. (#7136)
• Run replication streamers on workers. (#7146)
• Add tests for outbound device pokes. (#7157)
• Fix device list update stream ids going backward. (#7158)
• Use stream.current_token() and remove stream_positions(). (#7172)
• Move client command handling out of TCP protocol. (#7185)
• Move server command handling out of TCP protocol. (#7187)
• Fix consistency of HTTP status codes reported in log lines. (#7188)
• Only run one background database update at a time. (#7190)
• Remove sent outbound device list pokes from the database. (#7192)
• Add a background database update job to clear out duplicate device_lists_outbound_pokes. (#7193)
• Remove some extraneous debugging log lines. (#7207)
• Add explicit Python build tooling as dependencies for the snapcraft build. (#7213)
• Add typing information to federation server code. (#7219)
• Extend room admin api (GET /_synapse/admin/v1/rooms) with additional attributes. (#7225)
• Unblacklist '/upgrade creates a new room' sytest for workers. (#7228)
• Remove redundant checks on daemonize from synctl. (#7233)
• Upgrade jQuery to v3.4.1 on fallback login/registration pages. (#7236)
• Change log line that told user to implement onLogin/onRegister fallback js functions to a warning, instead of an info, so it's more visible. (#7237)
• Correct the parameters of a test fixture. Contributed by Isaiah Singletary. (#7243)
• Convert auth handler to async/await. (#7261)
• Add some unit tests for replication. (#7278)
• Improve typing annotations in synapse.replication.tcp.streams.Stream. (#7291)
• Reduce log verbosity of url cache cleanup tasks. (#7295)
• Fix sample SAML Service Provider configuration. Contributed by @frcl. (#7300)
• Fix StreamChangeCache to work with multiple entities changing on the same stream id. (#7303)
• Fix an incorrect import in IdentityHandler. (#7319)
• Reduce logging verbosity for successful federation requests. (#7321)
• Convert some federation handler code to async/await. (#7338)
• Fix collation for postgres for unit tests. (#7359)
• Convert RegistrationWorkerStore.is_server_admin and dependent code to async/await. (#7363)
• Add an instance_name to RDATA and POSITION replication commands. (#7364)
• Thread through instance name to replication client. (#7369)
• Convert synapse.server_notices to async/await. (#7394)
• Convert synapse.notifier to async/await. (#7395)
• Fix issues with the Python package manifest. (#7404)
• Prevent methods in synapse.handlers.auth from polling the homeserver config every request. (#7420)
• Speed up fetching device lists changes when handling /sync requests. (#7423)
• Run group attestation renewal in series rather than parallel for performance. (#7442)
• Fix linting errors in new version of Flake8. (#7470)
• Update the version of dh-virtualenv we use to build debs, and add focal to the list of target distributions. (#7526)

A small patch release containing features and bugs to support the upcoming launch of cross signing. We are very close now :)

Get 1.12.4 from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since v1.12.3

Synapse 1.12.4 (2020-04-23)

No significant changes.

Synapse 1.12.4rc1 (2020-04-22)

Features

• Always send users their own device updates. (#7160)
• Add support for handling GET requests for account_data on a worker. (#7311)

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug that prevented cross-signing with users on worker-mode synapses. (#7255)
• Do not treat display names as globs in push rules. (#7271)
• Fix a bug with cross-signing devices belonging to remote users who did not share a room with any user on the local homeserver. (#7289)

A small patch release to fix regressions introduced in v1.11.0 and v1.12.0.

Update 1.12.3 is a fast follow release from 1.12.2

Get 1.12.3 (not 1.12.2) from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since v1.12.0

Synapse 1.12.3 (2020-04-03)

• Remove the the pin to Pillow 7.0 which was introduced in Synapse 1.12.2, and correctly fix the issue with building the Debian packages. (#7212)

Synapse 1.12.2 (2020-04-02)

This release fixes an issue with building the debian packages.

Synapse 1.12.1 (2020-04-02)

No significant changes since 1.12.1rc1.

Synapse 1.12.1rc1 (2020-03-31)

Bugfixes

• Fix starting workers when federation sending not split out. (#7133). Introduced in v1.12.0.
• Avoid importing sqlite3 when using the postgres backend. Contributed by David Vo. (#7155). Introduced in v1.12.0rc1.
• Fix a bug which could cause outbound federation traffic to stop working if a client uploaded an incorrect e2e device signature. (#7177). Introduced in v1.11.0.

Synapse 1.12.0 is here.

The most important reason to upgrade to 1.12.0 is that it contains performance improvements to boost the efficiency of state resolution in room versions greater than v1 (#7095).

It also contains an implementation of (MSC2432) designed to limit room alias abuse. The MSC contains the full details, but in short admins now have more control over aliases as they appear on their local server.

There is also plenty of ground work for our master process sharding project. Nothing that can be used today unfortunately, but expect big improvements for worker based deployments over the coming weeks.

Please pay special attention to the security advisory in the changelog, TL;DR make sure your installation is using Twisted 20.3.0.

Also, note that once Synapse 1.13.0 is released, the default branch will change to being develop rather than master. Again more details follow in the changelog.

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.11.1

Synapse 1.12.0 (2020-03-23)

No significant changes since 1.12.0rc1.

Debian packages and Docker images are rebuilt using the latest versions of dependency libraries, including Twisted 20.3.0. Please see security advisory below.

Security advisory

Synapse may be vulnerable to request-smuggling attacks when it is used with a reverse-proxy. The vulnerabilities are fixed in Twisted 20.3.0, and are described in CVE-2020-10108 and CVE-2020-10109. For a good introduction to this class of request-smuggling attacks, see https://portswigger.net/research/http-desync-attacks-request-smuggling-reborn.

We are not aware of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, and do not believe that they are exploitable with current versions of any reverse proxies. Nevertheless, we recommend that all Synapse administrators ensure that they have the latest versions of the Twisted library to ensure that their installation remains secure.

• Administrators using the matrix.org Docker image or the Debian/Ubuntu packages from matrix.org should ensure that they have version 1.12.0 installed: these images include Twisted 20.3.0.
• Administrators who have installed Synapse from source should upgrade Twisted within their virtualenv by running:

  <path_to_virtualenv>/bin/pip install 'Twisted>=20.3.0'
  

• Administrators who have installed Synapse from distribution packages should consult the information from their distributions.

The matrix.org Synapse instance was not vulnerable to these vulnerabilities.

Advance notice of change to the default git branch for Synapse

Currently, the default git branch for Synapse is master, which tracks the latest release.

After the release of Synapse 1.13.0, we intend to change this default to develop, which is the development tip. This is more consistent with common practice and modern git usage.

Although we try to keep develop in a stable state, there may be occasions where regressions creep in. Developers and distributors who have scripts which run builds using the default branch of Synapse should therefore consider pinning their scripts to master.

Synapse 1.12.0rc1 (2020-03-19)

Features

• Changes related to room alias management (MSC2432):
  • Publishing/removing a room from the room directory now requires the user to have a power level capable of modifying the canonical alias, instead of the room aliases. (#6965)
  • Validate the alt_aliases property of canonical alias events. (#6971)
  • Users with a power level sufficient to modify the canonical alias of a room can now delete room aliases. (#6986)
  • Implement updated authorization rules and redaction rules for aliases events, from MSC2261 and MSC2432. (#7037)
  • Stop sending m.room.aliases events during room creation and upgrade. (#6941)
  • Synapse no longer uses room alias events to calculate room names for push notifications. (#6966)
  • The room list endpoint no longer returns a list of aliases. (#6970)
  • Remove special handling of aliases events from MSC2260 added in v1.10.0rc1. (#7034)
• Expose the synctl, hash_password and generate_config commands in the snapcraft package. Contributed by @devec0. (#6315)
• Check that server_name is correctly set before running database updates. (#6982)
• Break down monthly active users by appservice_id and emit via Prometheus. (#7030)
• Render a configurable and comprehensible error page if something goes wrong during the SAML2 authentication process. (#7058, #7067)
• Add an optional parameter to control whether other sessions are logged out when a user's password is modified. (#7085)
• Add prometheus metrics for the number of active pushers. (#7103, #7106)
• Improve performance when making HTTPS requests to sygnal, sydent, etc, by sharing the SSL context object between connections. (#7094)

Bugfixes

• When a user's profile is updated via the admin API, also generate a displayname/avatar update for that user in each room. (#6572)
• Fix a couple of bugs in email configuration handling. (#6962)
• Fix an issue affecting worker-based deployments where replication would stop working, necessitating a full restart, after joining a large room. (#6967)
• Fix duplicate key error which was logged when rejoining a room over federation. (#6968)
• Prevent user from setting 'deactivated' to anything other than a bool on the v2 PUT /users Admin API. (#6990)
• Fix py35-old CI by using native tox package. (#7018)
• Fix a bug causing org.matrix.dummy_event to be included in responses from /sync. (#7035)
• Fix a bug that renders UTF-8 text files incorrectly when loaded from media. Contributed by @TheStranjer. (#7044)
• Fix a bug that would cause Synapse to respond with an error about event visibility if a client tried to request the state of a room at a given token. (#7066)
• Repair a data-corruption issue which was introduced in Synapse 1.10, and fixed in Synapse 1.11, and which could cause /sync to return with 404 errors about missing events and unknown rooms. (#7070)
• Fix a bug causing account validity renewal emails to be sent even if the feature is turned off in some cases. (#7074)

Improved Documentation

• Updated CentOS8 install instructions. Contributed by Richard Kellner. (#6925)
• Fix POSTGRES_INITDB_ARGS in the contrib/docker/docker-compose.yml example docker-compose configuration. (#6984)
• Change date in https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md for last date of getting TLS certificates to November 2019. (#7015)
• Document that the fallback auth endpoints must be routed to the same worker node as the register endpoints. (#7048)

Deprecations and Removals

• Remove the unused query_auth federation endpoint per MSC2451. (#7026)

Internal Changes

• Add type hints to logging/context.py. (#6309)
• Add some clarifications to README.md in the database schema directory. (#6615)
• Refactoring work in preparation for changing the event redaction algorithm. (#6874, #6875, #6983, #7003)
• Improve performance of v2 state resolution for large rooms. (#6952, #7095)
• Reduce time spent doing GC, by freezing objects on startup. (#6953)
• Minor performance fixes to get_auth_chain_ids. (#6954)
• Don't record remote cross-signing keys in the devices table. (#6956)
• Use flake8-comprehensions to enforce good hygiene of list/set/dict comprehensions. (#6957)
• Merge worker apps together. (#6964, #7002, #7055, #7104)
• Remove redundant store_room call from FederationHandler._process_received_pdu. (#6979)
• Update warning for incorrect database collation/ctype to include link to documentation. (#6985)
• Add some type annotations to the database storage classes. (#6987)
• Port synapse.handlers.presence to async/await. (#6991, #7019)
• Add some type annotations to the federation base & client classes. (#6995)
• Port synapse.rest.keys to async/await. (#7020)
• Add a type check to is_verified when processing room keys. (#7045)
• Add type annotations and comments to the auth handler. (#7063)

Synapse 1.11.1 is a security release which contains a fix impacting installations using Single Sign-On (i.e. SAML2 or CAS) for authentication. Administrators of such installations are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.

Admins not using Single Sign-On to authenticate users are not affected though may wish to upgrade anyway to pull in some unrelated bug fixes.

Thanks to Rhys Davies for the responsible disclosure.

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.11.0

Synapse 1.11.1 (2020-03-03)

This release includes a security fix impacting installations using Single Sign-On (i.e. SAML2 or CAS) for authentication. Administrators of such installations are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.

The release also includes fixes for a couple of other bugs.

Bugfixes

• Add a confirmation step to the SSO login flow before redirecting users to the redirect URL. (b2bd54a2, 65c73cdf, a0178df1)
• Fixed set a user as an admin with the admin API PUT /_synapse/admin/v2/users/<user_id>. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#6910)
• Fix bug introduced in Synapse 1.11.0 which sometimes caused errors when joining rooms over federation, with 'coroutine' object has no attribute 'event_id'. (#6996)

The whole Matrix project is racing towards enabling e2ee by default. Synapse is no different and v1.10.0 contains multiple e2ee UX improvements, as well as a bug fix that prevented cross signing requests over federation to work reliably.

If any of your users are on the bleeding edge and have already started using cross signing (by enabling labs flags in Riot), then it will be necessary for them to force Synapse to re-send device updates by renaming all of their devices.

We've also included a temporary fix to address alias abuse. The idea is that until #6898 lands, servers will refrain from sharing events of type m.room.aliases with clients. Most admins will not be affected, but if you are present in rooms subject to alias abuse, then upgrading provides a pragmatic short term solution.

Finally, as of this release Synapse validates client_secret parameters in the Client-Server API as per the spec. See #6766 for details.

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.9.0

Synapse 1.10.0 (2020-02-12)

WARNING to client developers: As of this release Synapse validates client_secret parameters in the Client-Server API as per the spec. See #6766 for details.

Updates to the Docker image

• Update the docker images to Alpine Linux 3.11. (#6897)

Synapse 1.10.0rc5 (2020-02-11)

Bugfixes

• Fix the filtering introduced in 1.10.0rc3 to also apply to the state blocks returned by /sync. (#6884)

Synapse 1.10.0rc4 (2020-02-11)

This release candidate was built incorrectly and is superseded by 1.10.0rc5.

Synapse 1.10.0rc3 (2020-02-10)

Features

• Filter out m.room.aliases from the CS API to mitigate abuse while a better solution is specced. (#6878)

Internal Changes

• Fix continuous integration failures with old versions of pip, which were introduced by a release of the zipp library. (#6880)

Synapse 1.10.0rc2 (2020-02-06)

Bugfixes

• Fix an issue with cross-signing where device signatures were not sent to remote servers. (#6844)
• Fix to the unknown remote device detection which was introduced in 1.10.rc1. (#6848)

Internal Changes

• Detect unexpected sender keys on remote encrypted events and resync device lists. (#6850)

Synapse 1.10.0rc1 (2020-01-31)

Features

• Add experimental support for updated authorization rules for aliases events, from MSC2260. (#6787, #6790, #6794)

Bugfixes

• Warn if postgres database has a non-C locale, as that can cause issues when upgrading locales (e.g. due to upgrading OS). (#6734)
• Minor fixes to PUT /_synapse/admin/v2/users admin api. (#6761)
• Validate client_secret parameter using the regex provided by the Client-Server API, temporarily allowing : characters for older clients. The : character will be removed in a future release. (#6767)
• Fix persisting redaction events that have been redacted (or otherwise don't have a redacts key). (#6771)
• Fix outbound federation request metrics. (#6795)
• Fix bug where querying a remote user's device keys that weren't cached resulted in only returning a single device. (#6796)
• Fix race in federation sender worker that delayed sending of device updates. (#6799, #6800)
• Fix bug where Synapse didn't invalidate cache of remote users' devices when Synapse left a room. (#6801)
• Fix waking up other workers when remote server is detected to have come back online. (#6811)

Improved Documentation

• Clarify documentation related to user_dir and federation_reader workers. (#6775)

Internal Changes

• Record room versions in the rooms table. (#6729, #6788, #6810)
• Propagate cache invalidates from workers to other workers. (#6748)
• Remove some unnecessary admin handler abstraction methods. (#6751)
• Add some debugging for media storage providers. (#6757)
• Detect unknown remote devices and mark cache as stale. (#6776, #6819)
• Attempt to resync remote users' devices when detected as stale. (#6786)
• Delete current state from the database when server leaves a room. (#6792)
• When a client asks for a remote user's device keys check if the local cache for that user has been marked as potentially stale. (#6797)
• Add background update to clean out left rooms from current state. (#6802, #6816)
• Refactoring work in preparation for changing the event redaction algorithm. (#6803, #6805, #6806, #6807, #6820)

A quick bug fix release that affects admins making use of monthly active user limits. You will know if you are affected because 1.9.0 will not start up. Apologies if you were bitten by this one!

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.9.1

Synapse 1.9.1 (2020-01-28)

Bugfixes

• Fix bug where setting mau_limit_reserved_threepids config would cause Synapse to refuse to start. (#6793)

Synapse 1.9.0 contains a bunch of new admin APIs as well as bug fixes to existing ones. In particular we have a new end point that allows admins to query which rooms their server participates in.

Aside from that it is worth noting that we have officially dropped support for SQLite versions < 3.11. Though more generally we would recommend that all admins migrate to Postgres for anything other than test and evaluation purposes.

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.8.0

Synapse 1.9.0 (2020-01-23)

WARNING: As of this release, Synapse no longer supports versions of SQLite before 3.11, and will refuse to start when configured to use an older version. Administrators are recommended to migrate their database to Postgres (see instructions here).

If your Synapse deployment uses workers, note that the reverse-proxy configurations for the synapse.app.media_repository, synapse.app.federation_reader and synapse.app.event_creator workers have changed, with the addition of a few paths (see the updated configurations here). Existing configurations will continue to work.

Improved Documentation

• Fix endpoint documentation for the List Rooms admin API. (#6770)

Synapse 1.9.0rc1 (2020-01-22)

Features

• Allow admin to create or modify a user. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#5742)
• Add new quarantine media admin APIs to quarantine by media ID or by user who uploaded the media. (#6681, #6756)
• Add org.matrix.e2e_cross_signing to unstable_features in /versions as per MSC1756. (#6712)
• Add a new admin API to list and filter rooms on the server. (#6720)

Bugfixes

• Correctly proxy HTTP errors due to API calls to remote group servers. (#6654)
• Fix media repo admin APIs when using a media worker. (#6664)
• Fix "CRITICAL" errors being logged when a request is received for a uri containing non-ascii characters. (#6682)
• Fix a bug where we would assign a numeric user ID if somebody tried registering with an empty username. (#6690)
• Fix purge_room admin API. (#6711)
• Fix a bug causing Synapse to not always purge quiet rooms with a low max_lifetime in their message retention policies when running the automated purge jobs. (#6714)
• Fix the synapse_port_db not correctly running background updates. Thanks @tadzik for reporting. (#6718)
• Fix changing password via user admin API. (#6730)
• Fix /events/:event_id deprecated API. (#6731)
• Fix monthly active user limiting support for worker mode, fixes #4639. (#6742)
• Fix bug when setting account_validity to an empty block in the config. Thanks to @Sorunome for reporting. (#6747)
• Fix AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get' in hash_password when configuration has an empty password_config. Contributed by @ivilata. (#6753)
• Fix the docker-compose.yaml overriding the entire /etc folder of the container. Contributed by Fabian Meyer. (#6656)

Improved Documentation

• Fix a typo in the configuration example for purge jobs in the sample configuration file. (#6621)
• Add complete documentation of the message retention policies support. (#6624, #6665)
• Add some helpful tips about changelog entries to the GitHub pull request template. (#6663)
• Clarify the account_validity and email sections of the sample configuration. (#6685)
• Add more endpoints to the documentation for Synapse workers. (#6698)

Deprecations and Removals

• Synapse no longer supports versions of SQLite before 3.11, and will refuse to start when configured to use an older version. Administrators are recommended to migrate their database to Postgres (see instructions here). (#6675)

Internal Changes

• Add local_current_membership table for tracking local user membership state in rooms. (#6655, #6728)
• Port synapse.replication.tcp to async/await. (#6666)
• Fixup synapse.replication to pass mypy checks. (#6667)
• Allow additional_resources to implement IResource directly. (#6686)
• Allow REST endpoint implementations to raise a RedirectException, which will redirect the user's browser to a given location. (#6687)
• Updates and extensions to the module API. (#6688)
• Updates to the SAML mapping provider API. (#6689, #6723)
• Remove redundant RegistrationError class. (#6691)
• Don't block processing of incoming EDUs behind processing PDUs in the same transaction. (#6697)
• Remove duplicate check for the session query parameter on the /auth/xxx/fallback/web Client-Server endpoint. (#6702)
• Attempt to retry sending a transaction when we detect a remote server has come back online, rather than waiting for a transaction to be triggered by new data. (#6706)
• Add StateMap type alias to simplify types. (#6715)
• Add a DeltaState to track changes to be made to current state during event persistence. (#6716)
• Add more logging around message retention policies support. (#6717)
• When processing a SAML response, log the assertions for easier configuration. (#6724)
• Fixup synapse.rest to pass mypy. (#6732, #6764)
• Fixup synapse.api to pass mypy. (#6733)
• Allow streaming cache 'invalidate all' to workers. (#6749)
• Remove unused CI docker compose files. (#6754)