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The Matrix Holiday Update 2023

25.12.2023 00:00 — General Matthew Hodgson

Hi all,

2023 has been a pivotal year for Matrix, with huge changes landing both organisationally and technically to prepare the protocol for future generations. The ecosystem has once again gone from strength to strength, with active users (based on Synapse opt-in phone-home reporting) doubling across the public network, and more projects building on Matrix than we can count (look out for the “This Year in Matrix” community wrap-up blog post) - and more organisations than we can track joining Matrix for all their secure decentralised communication needs.

On the governance side, we are in an incredibly exciting new era with Josh joining the Matrix.org Foundation as its first ever Managing Director (and employee!), with a mandate to cement sustainable funding for Matrix as an independent foundation, governed by the forthcoming elected open Governance Board. Now, Matrix needs funding more than ever - but rather than turning the entirety of this post into a plea for donations, I’m going to let Josh fly the flag in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, if you want Matrix to keep existing (especially if you’re an organisation who builds on Matrix) please join the Foundation and donate.

On the technical side: the theme of the year has been one of focus: extreme, overdue, focus.

Over the years, it’s fair to say that the core team has tried to strike a balance between building the core foundational technology of Matrix (the spec, a stable server implementation, client SDKs, end-to-end encryption, VoIP, etc)... and long-term forward-looking projects designed to futureproof Matrix (e.g. Account Portability, P2P Matrix, Dendrite, Hydrogen) and/or inspire developers to build on Matrix for more than just chat (e.g. Third Room, Applications Beyond Chat). In retrospect, this was wildly optimistic: we underestimated the amount of remaining work needed to polish the foundational tech to mainstream quality - and despite Matrix uptake going through the roof, this hasn’t translated into sufficient funding to have the luxury to support folks to proactively work on next-gen projects (or foundational projects, for that matter).

So, this year, we’ve ended up focused on one thing: getting the foundational Matrix featureset to better-than-mainstream quality, performance and stability. We’ve dubbed the overall initiative Matrix 2.0, and kicked it off at FOSDEM 2023 with our Matrix 2.0: How we’re making Matrix go vooooom main-stage talk.

The Road to Matrix 2.0

Matrix 2.0 isn’t (yet) an actual versioned release of the Matrix specification - instead, it describes the various foundational projects needed to get quality, performance and stability up to and beyond that of today’s mainstream messaging apps. These projects are:

  • Sliding Sync (MSC3575): the ability to instantly log in, launch and sync Matrix clients no matter how large or busy the account.
  • Native E2EE Group VoIP (MSC3898 + TBA): scalable video and voice conferencing and calling built natively on Matrix and so benefiting from Matrix’s end-to-end encryption.
  • Native OIDC (MSC3861): replacing Matrix’s historical authentication mechanisms with industry-standard Open ID Connect (giving us two factor authentication, multi-factor auth, passkeys, and radically simplifying auth implementations for both client and server developers).
  • Faster Remote Room Joins (MSC3902): letting servers rapidly join rooms on other servers by incrementally participating in the room.

Over the course of the year Matrix 2.0 has gone from the initial demo on stage at FOSDEM to concrete implementations which users can play with today as announced in our Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix post in September. Since then, we’ve been busy polishing away. On Sliding Sync, the proxy has pretty much stabilised - although the protocol itself can and should be simplified before we think seriously about native implementations (in practice, having the server track room list ordering gets very fiddly when only clients can really determine the final ordering, due to E2EE). Element X and matrix-rust-sdk has been the main implementation driving forwards Sliding Sync and much of the other Matrix 2.0 work, for those itching to play with it.

On Native Group VoIP: we’ve gone through many iterations over the year - starting off with Full Mesh calling (good for ~7 users per call); then switching to the experimental waterfall Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) to provide scalable but not-E2EE conferencing; and then switching to a hybrid solution using LiveKit to provide an E2EE-capable scalable SFU, but with the signalling and encryption all handled by Matrix. Element Call is the main implementation driving forwards the underlying Matrix work here, and Element Call Beta 3 showed off the new LiveKit based implementation in July - which was then integrated with Element X complete with end-to-end encryption in November. There’s still some polishing remaining here, with a new layout engine in the wings for Element Call, and enabling full encrypted-per-sender conferencing by default in both Element Web and Element X, but it really feels like the hardest work is behind us now: the core team has been successfully doing all of its collaboration on Element Call for months now, like so:

E2EE scalable Element Call

On Open ID Connect: things are also shaping up well. This will be the first time that we’ve replaced a large chunk of the Matrix spec with something else, and in order to manage your account in Matrix 2.0-native clients like Element X homeserver admins will need to migrate their authentication to the new OIDC World using matrix-authentication-service (MAS). There’s a great blog post from September which explains what this will entail - and since then, we even have the beginnings of syn2mas: a migration script to migrate from Synapse-managed accounts to MAS-managed accounts (warning: still experimental). The Matrix.org homeserver hasn’t been migrated yet (as we need to support social login first), but an increasing number of standalone Matrix servers are going OIDC-native, so arguably the migration has already begun! We’ll keep https://areweoidcyet.com updated as the project progresses.

Finally, the core of Faster Remote Room Joins (FRRJ) shipped in Synapse back in February. There’s still some major speedups that FRRJ could unlock, but the other tracks of Matrix 2.0 have been taking priority.

So: Matrix 2.0 is palpably on the horizon - all that remains is polish on the example clients (Element X & Element Call), full support for migrating to OIDC, and landing the MSCs into the spec. For instance, Element X just added read receipts and (early) E2EE backup support in the last few days - the gap is closing! It’s worth noting that significant amounts of this work has been funded by BWI for BwMessenger and BundesMessenger: huge thanks to BWI for supporting core Matrix development by contracting Element.

Levelling up on Encryption

Encryption stability received a huge amount of attention this year. It turns out that reliable end-to-end encryption is surprisingly tricky in a decentralised environment, and historically we’ve been playing on hard mode by implementing three entirely separate implementations of the Matrix layer of encryption between matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2, each with their own bugs - more than tripling the costs of development, audits, and maintenance by the Foundation (quite ignoring the independent implementations from the community in mtxclient, libquotient, matrix-dart-sdk, trixnity etc).

So a huge project has been underway to converge on a single auditable codebase for the core team’s E2EE implementation so that any bugs or future features can be resolved in a single place. That codebase is matrix-rust-sdk’s matrix-sdk-crypto crate (and our underlying vodozemac double ratchet implementation) - and we’re proud to say that we are using it for encryption in matrix-rust-sdk itself (as showcased by Element X and Fractal 5), matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 (as used in the old Element iOS & Android apps), and have now merged it in matrix-js-sdk too (available for new logins on develop.element.io). The process of rustifying the encryption in Element Web and the old iOS & Android apps has been nicknamed “Element R”.

The process of switching matrix-js-sdk to use Rust encryption has been particularly gruelling, requiring compiling matrix-sdk-crypto down to WASM as matrix-rust-sdk-crypto-wasm and then doing heart surgery to replace the old JS crypto implementation… while also needing to extensively loop from WASM back into the browser to use IndexedDB for storage, all while outperforming the old implementation. It’s tantalisingly close now: while develop.element.io has it turned on by default for new logins, there are still a few remaining performance edge cases to be chased down related to online backup before we migrate everyone to it. The remaining blocking issues can be found on GitHub for those interested in tracking progress.

matrix-crypto-sdk is already manifestly more reliable than the old implementations (in terms of the chances of hitting infamous Unable To Decrypt errors) - and now that we are so close to converging on it everywhere, the race is on to ensure that any remaining defects get flushed out for once and for all. One of the new initiatives here is called complement-crypto - a full end-to-end torture testing suite specifically for matrix-crypto-sdk. You can read all about it in the announcement post a few weeks ago, but suffice it to say it’s a super exciting project which stress-tests both matrix-rust-sdk and matrix-js-sdk (with the new rust crypto implementation) against federated Synapse containers in order to test E2EE under the most horrible failure modes imaginable. It’s already picked up some elusive bugs which have plagued us for literally years, and it looks set to be the main framework by which we will hunt down and kill any remaining issues. See the Test hitlist for the full scope we’re targeting.

Now that everyone’s (almost) converged on matrix-sdk-crypto, the next big project for the Crypto Team is going to be improving the E2EE usability (at last!). The big news here is that we’re shifting to Trust On First Use (TOFU) for user trust. Specifically: this means that we will only encrypt messages to devices whose owner has explicitly cross-signed them (essentially trusting the owner by default). You will still be able to explicitly verify that other users are not being impersonated (via QR scan or emoji comparison), but this should improve the default behaviour to be much more secure. Alongside TOFU will come other radical simplifications of the E2EE UX (both around login, self-verification, cross-verification and backup), so watch this space: the game is afoot to finally fix Matrix’s E2EE usability, now we can make all the changes in one place!

Finally, work continues to progress at matrix-dmls on supporting a decentralised dialect of Messaging Layer Security (MLS, RFC9420) on top of Matrix as an alternative to our normal Olm/Megolm encryption, with recent work focused on making it play nice with matrix-sdk-crypto. https://arewemlsyet.com is the place to track updates (although it’s a bit overdue for an update).

In other news

Faced with limited funding and the decision to focus exclusively on stability, reliability and performance, there have inevitably been some major changes impacting the core team.

One of the biggest changes is that Element (the company formed by the core Matrix team back in 2017 to try to fund our work on Matrix) can no longer financially afford to donate its work on Synapse and other server components to the Matrix Foundation under the permissive Apache licence. Instead, Element is continuing development under the copyleft AGPLv3 licence at github.com/element-hq/synapse going forwards. This is to let Element sell AGPL exceptions to commercial Matrix vendors in order to fund their underlying Matrix development: you can read more about it at Element’s announcement - or you can listen to this week’s Matrix Live for a firsthand explanation:

The other major change is that we’ve had no choice but pause development on the majority of the core team’s next-generation Matrix projects. We had high hopes of being able to secure dedicated funding for Third Room (especially after the awesome Tech Preview 2: Creator Update in June), but the interested parties did not come through, and the team has now disbanded. Meanwhile, P2P Matrix and Low Bandwidth Matrix is on hiatus until there’s dedicated funding - and Account Portability work is also temporarily paused in favour of commercial Element work, despite the fantastic progress made recently with Pseudo IDs (MSC4014) and Cryptographic identifiers (MSC4080). Given P2P Matrix and Account Portability were the main projects driving Dendrite development recently, this may also cause a slow-down in Dendrite development, although Dendrite itself will still be maintained.

Needless to say, this is far from an ideal situation: we sent up distress flares loud and clear at the beginning of last year’s holiday update; and we’ve now had to shrink to focus exclusively on the core projects. However, we’re optimistic that the tighter focus in the medium term will help us get back to the point where we can resume the longer-term projects - assuming that organisations (and individuals) dependent on Matrix sign up to support the project.

Conclusion

Despite the downsides of 2023, right now we’re feeling distinctly optimistic: Matrix 2.0 clients like Element X already outperform the best proprietary mainstream options by many metrics - and focusing purely on improving the foundations is only going to improve that. We may not have taken the most direct route to get to where we are today, but it genuinely feels like 2024 will be the year where Matrix overtakes the incumbents.

Talking of which, there’s just one last thing to mention: amidst the economic challenges of 2023, one future-facing core team Matrix project has survived: our work around the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA is leading antitrust legislation from the European Commission, which aims to stop big centralised tech companies (so called ‘gatekeepers’) from carelessly suppressing innovation, competition and consumer choice by trapping users inside their walled gardens.

Needless to say, we’ve been tracking the DMA closely throughout its gestation, and we’re now in the final sprint: in March 2024, messaging services which have been identified as gatekeepers will have to open their networks to allow interoperability with requesting messaging services (while preserving E2EE, if they’re encrypted). So far, only WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have been identified as gatekeeper services (Apple is doing everything they can to wriggle out of it). However, it looks like WhatsApp is taking it seriously, which could prove very interesting indeed.

As Matrix, we’ve taken a two-pronged approach: on one side, showcasing how Matrix as it stands today can already bridge existing chat systems together as a highest-common-denominator protocol (including preserving E2EE, if they happen to already use the Double Ratchet). On the other side, we’ve also been contributing significantly to MIMI, the IETF Working Group dedicated to standardising a lowest-common-denominator protocol specifically for DMA interoperability.

2023 has involved a lot of work on MIMI, participating in the Design Team alongside Phoenix, Wire, Cisco, Google and Wickr - and at IETF 118 in Prague in November we collectively proposed the first draft of the protocol (see also the architecture presentation for context). MIMI has ended up taking some inspiration from Matrix (and Linearized Matrix, a simplified dialect we proposed which does away with full-mesh decentralisation), while focusing very tightly on the specific problems of server-to-server interop between existing communication services - leaning on MLS (where available) for synchronising state across the services, while also leaving the door open for using the Double Ratchet to provide an on-ramp for pragmatic bridging to today’s services (including Matrix!).

MIMI’s tight focus means that it doesn’t currently provide conversation history, arbitrary state events, or decentralised conversations - and is focused purely on server-server communication. However, there’s certainly a world where Matrix could evolve to be compatible with MIMI - such a hypothetical Matrix 3.0 would effectively layer Matrix’s richer existing semantics (decentralised conversations, extensible state events, state resolution, group VoIP etc) on top of MIMI’s subset of functionality. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to provide both Matrix for pragmatic DMA interoperability for today - and participate in MIMI for IETF-track interoperability.

Anyhow: hopefully it’s clear that 2024 is going to be a super interesting year for Matrix - whether that’s simply by nailing Matrix 2.0, or whatever excitements DMA interoperability brings. And if you’re relying on Matrix: please donate.

Meanwhile - have a fantastic end of the year; and thanks once again for flying Matrix.

- Matthew, Amandine, Josh & the whole team.

Call for Participation to the FOSDEM 2024 Matrix Devroom

10.11.2023 15:00 — General Thib

Building on last year's success, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host a Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person this year again at FOSDEM. Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.

Continue reading…

Matrix 2.0: The Future of Matrix

21.09.2023 15:30 — General Matthew Hodgson

TL;DR: If you want to play with a shiny new Matrix 2.0 client, head over to Element X.

Matrix has been going for over 9 years now, providing an open standard for secure, decentralised communication for the open Web - and it’s been quite the journey to get to where we are today. Right now, according to Synapse’s opt-in usage reporting, in total there are 111,873,374 matrix IDs on the public network, spanning 17,289,201 rooms, spread over 64,256 servers. This is just scratching the surface, given we estimate that 66% of servers in the public network don’t report stats, and there are many enormous private networks of servers too. We’ve come a long way from creating Matrix HQ as the first ever room on today’s public network, back on Aug 13th 2014 :)

Meanwhile, the Matrix ecosystem has continued to grow unbelievably - with huge numbers of independent clients, bots and bridges maturing into ecosystems of their own, whole new companies forming around the protocol, and organisations ranging from open source projects to governments, NGOs and Fortune 100 companies adopting Matrix as a way to run their own secure, decentralised, standards-based self-sovereign communication.

The world needs Matrix more than ever. Every day the importance of decentralisation is more painfully obvious, as we concretely see the terrifying risks of centralised Internet services - whether that’s through corporate takeover, state censorship, blanket surveillance, Internet shutdowns, surveillance capitalism, or the spectre of gigantic centralised data breaches. It’s been amazing to see the world pivot in favour of decentralisation over the time we’ve been building Matrix, and our mission has never been more important.

On one hand it feels we’re creeping ever closer to that goal of providing the missing communication layer for the open Web. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a huge step in that direction - regulation that mandates that if the large centralised messaging providers are to operate in the EU, they must interoperate. We’ve been busy working away to make this a reality, including participating in the IETF for the first time as part of the MIMI working group - demonstrating concretely how (for instance) Android Messages could natively speak Matrix in order to interoperate with other services, while preserving end-to-end encryption.

On the other hand, Matrix has often got stuck in focusing on solving the Hard Problems of decentralisation, decentralised end-to-end encryption, and the logistical complexities of supporting a massive heterogeneous public communication network and its surrounding heterogeneous ecosystem. It’s fair to say that in the early days our focus was on making something that worked at all - and then later, we shifted to focusing on something that worked and scaled correctly… but we hadn’t managed to focus on ensuring that Matrix provides the building blocks necessary to create blazingly fast, hyper-efficient communication apps which has potential to outperform the centralised mainstream messaging services…

…until now!

Matrix 2.0

Back at FOSDEM we announced the idea of Matrix 2.0 - a series of huge step changes in terms of Matrix’s usability and performance, made up of Sliding Sync (instant login/launch/sync), Native OIDC (industry-standard authentication), Native Group VoIP (end-to-end encrypted large-scale voice & video conferencing) and Faster Joins (lazy-loading room state when your server joins a room).

Now, we’re excited to announce that as of today everyone can start playing with these Matrix 2.0 features. There’s still some work to bring them formally into the specification, but we’re putting it out there for folks to experience right now. Developers: watch this space for updates on the spec front.

Practically speaking, this means there are now implementations of the four pillars of Matrix 2.0 available today which you can use to power a daily-driver Matrix 2.0 client. The work here has been driven primarily by Element, using their new Element X client as the test-bed for the new Matrix 2.0 functionality and to prove that the new APIs are informed by real-world usage and can concretely demonstrably create an app which begins to outperform iMessage, WhatsApp and Telegram in terms of usability and performance… all while benefiting from being 100% built on Matrix.

matrix-rust-sdk and Element X

The mission of Matrix 2.0 has been to provide a huge step forwards in real-world performance, usability and stability - and that means using a real client codebase as a guinea pig to ensure the new protocol is fit for purpose. matrix-rust-sdk has been the main vehicle for this, with Element X as the app primarily driving the new features (although other clients built on matrix-rust-sdk such as Fractal 5 can then automatically benefit from the work should they wish).

To see what all the fuss is about, your best bet is probably to head over to the Element X launch blog post and read all about it! But from the Matrix perspective, this is a flag day in terms of the existence of a Matrix client which empirically outperforms the mainstream clients both in terms of usability and performance: it shows that Matrix is indeed viable to power communication for billions of users, should we get the chance.

From a client perspective: this has meant implementing Sliding Sync (MSC3575) in matrix-rust-sdk - and then creating the entirely new matrix-sdk-ui crate in order to expose higher level APIs to help apps efficiently drive their UI, without each app having to keep reinventing the wheel and risking getting it wrong. The new UI crate gives APIs for efficiently managing a lazy-loaded room list, lazy-loaded room timelines (including edits, reactions, aggregations, redactions etc), and even when the app should show a sync spinner or not. As a result, the vast majority of the heavy lifting can be handled in matrix-rust-sdk, ensuring that the app layer can focus on UI rather than Matrix guts - and performance improvements (e.g. roomlist caching and timeline caching) can all be handled in one place to the benefit of all clients using the SDK.

This is a huge breakthrough relative to the old days of Matrix where each client would have no choice but burn significant amounts of time hand-carving its own timeline and encryption glue logic (although of course clients are still very welcome to do so if they wish!) - but for those wanting higher-level building blocks, matrix-rust-sdk now provides an excellent basis for experimenting with Matrix 2.0 clients. It’s worth noting that the library is still evolving fast, though, and many APIs are not long-term stable. Both the Sliding Sync API and the UI crates are still subject to significant change, and while the crypto crate and its underlying vodozemac E2EE implementation is pretty stable, features such as E2EE Backup are still being added to the top-level matrix-rust-sdk (and thence Element X).

In order to hook matrix-rust-sdk up to Element X, the Element team ended up contributing cancellable async bindings to uniffi, Mozilla’s language binding generator, so you can now call matrix-rust-sdk directly from Swift, Kotlin and (in theory) other languages, complete with beautifully simple async/await non-blocking semantics. This looks to be a pretty awesome stack for doing modern cross-platform development - so even if you have a project which isn’t natively in Rust, you should be able to lean on matrix-rust-sdk if you so desire! We hope that other projects will follow the Rust + Swift/Kotlin pattern for their extreme performance needs :)

Sliding Sync

The single biggest change in Matrix 2.0 is the proposal of an entirely new sync API called Sliding Sync (MSC3575). The goal of Sliding Sync is to ensure that the application has the option of loading the absolutely bare essential data required to render its visible user interface - ensuring that operations which have historically been horribly slow in Matrix (login and initial sync, launch and incremental sync) are instant, no matter how many rooms the user is in or how large those rooms are.

While matrix-rust-sdk implements both Sync v2 (the current API in Matrix 1.8) as well as Sliding Sync, Element X deliberately only implements Sliding Sync, in order to focus exclusively on getting the fastest UI possible (and generally to exercise the API). Therefore to use Element X, you need to be running a homeserver with Sliding Sync support, which (for now) means running a sliding-sync proxy which bolts Sliding Sync support on to existing homeservers. You can check out Thib’s excellent tutorial for how to get up and running (or Element Server Suite provides packages from the Element team)

Now, implementing Sliding Sync in matrix-rust-sdk has been a bit of a journey. Since we showed off the very first implementation at FOSDEM, two big problems came to light. For a bit of context: the original design of Sliding Sync was heavily inspired by Discord’s architecture - where the server calculates an ordered list of large numbers of items (your room list, in Matrix’s case); the client says which window into the list it’s currently displaying; and the server sends updates to the client as the view changes. The user then scrolls around that list, sliding the window up and down, and the server sends the appropriate updates - hence the name Sliding Sync.

Sliding Sync was originally driven by our work on Low Bandwidth Matrix - as it makes no sense to have a fancy line protocol which can run over a 2400 baud modem… if the first thing the app tries to do is download a 100MB Sync v2 initial-sync response, or for that matter a 10MB incremental-sync response after having been offline for a few days (10MB takes 9 hours to shift over a 2400 baud modem, for those who missed out on the 80s). Instead, you clearly only want to send the absolute essentials to the client, no matter how big their account is, and that’s what Sliding Sync does.

The first minor flaw in the plan, however, is that the server doesn’t necessarily have all the data it needs to order the room list. Room ordering depends on what the most recent visible events are in a room, and if the room’s end-to-end encrypted, the server has no way of knowing which events are going to be visible for a given client or not. It also doesn’t know which rooms have encrypted mentions inside them, and we don’t want to leak mention metadata to the server, or design out keyword mentions. So, MSC3575 proposed some complicated contortions to let the client tweak the order client-side based on its superior knowledge of the ordering (given most clients would need to sync all the encrypted rooms anyway, in order to index them and search for keyword notifications etc). Meanwhile, the order might be ‘good enough’ even without those tweaks.

The second minor flaw in the plan was that having implemented Sliding Sync in Element X, it turns out that the user experience on mobile of incrementally loading in room list entries from the server as the user scrolls around the list is simply not good enough, especially on bad connectivity - and the last thing we want to do is to design out support for bad connectivity in Matrix. Users have been trained on mobile to expect to be able to swipe rapidly through infinite-scrolling lists of tens of thousands of photos in their photo gallery, or tens of thousands of emails in their mail client, without ever seeing a single placeholder, even for a frame. So if the network roundtrip time to your server is even 100ms, and Sliding Sync is operating infinitely quickly, you’re still going to end up showing a placeholders for a few frames (6 frames, at 60fps, to be precise) if the user starts scrolling rapidly through their room list. And empirically that doesn’t look great - the 2007-vintage iOS team have a lot to answer for in terms of setting user expectations!

So, the obvious way to solve both of these problems is simply to pull in more data in the background, to anticipate the user scrolling around. In fact, it turns out we need to do that anyway, and indeed pull in all the room data so that room-search is instantly responsive; waiting 100ms or more to talk to the server whenever the user tries to search their roomlist is no fun at all, and it transpires that many users navigate their roomlist entirely by search rather than scrolling. As a result, the sliding sync implementation in matrix-rust-sdk has ended up maintaining an ‘all rooms’ list, which starts off syncing the roomlist details for the most recent N rooms, and then in the background expands to sync all the rest. At which point we’re not really sliding a window around any more: instead it’s more of a QoSed incremental sync.

So, to cut a long story short: while the current Sliding Sync implementation in matrix-rust-sdk and Element X empirically works very well, it’s ended up being a bit too complicated and we expect some pretty significant simplifications in the near future based on the best practices figured out with clients using it. Watch this space for updates, although it’s likely that the current form of MSC3575 will prevail in some respect in order to support low-bandwidth environments where roomlist ordering and roomsearch latency is less important than preserving bandwidth. Critically, we want to figure this out before we encourage folks to implement native server implementations - so for now, we’ll be keeping using the sliding-sync proxy as a way to rapidly experiment with the API as it evolves.

Native Matrix Group VoIP

Another pillar of Matrix 2.0 is that we finally have native Matrix Group VoIP calling (MSC3401)! Much like Sliding Sync has been developed using Element X as a testbed, Element Call has been the guinea pig for getting fully end-to-end-encrypted, scalable group voice/video calling implemented on top of Matrix, building on top of matrix-js-sdk. And as of today, Element Call finally has it working, complete with end-to-end encryption (and integrated in Element X, for that matter)!

Much like Sliding Sync, this has also been a bit of a journey. The original implementations of Element Call strictly followed MSC3401, using full mesh conferencing to effectively have every participant place a call to every other participant - thus decentralising the conference and avoiding the need for a conferencing ‘focus’ server… but limiting the conference to 7 or 8 participants given all the duplication of the sent video required. In Element Call Beta 2, end-to-end encryption was enabled; easy, given it’s just a set of 1:1 calls.

Then the real adventure began: to implement a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) which can be used to scale up to hundreds of users - or beyond. The unexpected first move came from Sean DuBois, project lead of the awesome Pion WebRTC stack for Golang - who wrote a proof-of-concept called sfu-to-sfu to demonstrate the viability of decentralised heterogenous cascading SFUs, as detailed in MSC3898. This would not only let calls on a single focus scale beyond hundreds of users, but also share the conferencing out across all the participating foci, providing the world’s first heterogeneous decentralised video conferencing. Element took the sfu-to-sfu implementation, hooked it up to Element Call on a branch, and renamed it as waterfall.

However, when Sean first contributed sfu-to-sfu, he mentioned to us that if Matrix is serious about SFUs, we should take a look at LiveKit - an open source startup not dissimilar to Element who were busy building best-in-class SFUs on top of Pion. And while waterfall worked well as a proof of concept, it became increasingly obvious that there’s a lot of work to be done around tuning congestion control, error correction, implementing end-to-end encryption etc which the LiveKit team had already spent years doing. So, Element reached out to the LiveKit team, and started experimenting with what it might take to implement a Matrix-capable SFU on top of the LiveKit engine.

The end result was Element Call Beta 3, which is an interesting hybrid between MSC3401 and LiveKit’s existing signalling: the high-level signalling of the call (its existence, membership, duration etc) is advertised by Matrix - but the actual WebRTC signalling is handled by LiveKit, providing support for hundreds of users per call.

Finally, today marks the release of Element Call Beta 4, which adds back end-to-end encryption via the LiveKit SFU (currently by using a shared static secret, but in the near future will support full Matrix-negotiated end-to-end encryption with sender keys) - and also includes a complete visual refresh. The next steps here include bringing back support for full mesh as well as SFU, for environments without an SFU, and updating all the MSCs to recognise the hybrid signalling model that reality has converged on when using LiveKit. Meanwhile, head over to https://call.element.io to give it a go, or read more about it in the Element X Ignition blog post!

Native Open ID Connect

Finally, last but not least, we’re proud to announce that the project to replace Matrix’s venerable existing authentication APIs with industry-standard Open ID Connect in Matrix 2.0 has taken a huge leap forwards today, with matrix-authentication-service now being available to add Native OIDC support to Synapse, as well as Element X now implementing account registration, login and management via Native OIDC (with legacy support only for login/logout).

This is a critical step forwards in improving the security and maintainability for Matrix’s authentication, and you can read all about it in this dedicated post, explaining the rationale for adopting OpenID Connect for all forms of authentication throughout Matrix, and what you need to know about the transition.

Conclusion

There has been an enormous amount of work that has gone into Matrix 2.0 so far - whether that’s implementing sliding sync in matrix-rust-sdk and sliding-sync proxy, matrix-authentication-service and all the native OIDC infrastructure on servers and clients, the entirety of Element Call and its underpinning matrix-js-sdk and SFU work, or indeed Faster Joins in Synapse, which shipped back in Jan.

It’s been a pretty stressful sprint to pull it all together, and huge thanks go to everyone who’s contributed - both from the team at Element, but also contributors to other projects like matrix-rust-sdk who have got caught in the crossfire :) It’s also been amazing seeing the level of support, high quality testing and excellent feedback from the wider community as folks have got excited about the promise of Matrix 2.0.

On the Foundation side, we’d like to thank the Members whose financial support has been critical in providing bandwidth to enable the progress on Matrix 2.0 - and for those who want to help accelerate Matrix, especially those commercially building on top of Matrix, please consider joining the Foundation as a member! Also, in case you missed it, we’re super excited to welcome Josh Simmons as Managing Director for the Foundation - focusing on running the Foundation membership programme and generally ensuring the growth of the Foundation funding for the benefit of the whole Matrix community. Matthew and Amandine continue to lead the overall project (alongside their day jobs at Element), with the support of the other three independent Guardians - but Josh is working full time exclusively on running the non-profit foundation and gathering funds to support Matrix.

Talking of funding, we should mention that we’ve had to pause work in other places due to lack of Matrix funding - especially while focusing on successfully shipping Matrix 2.0. Major next-generation projects including Third Room, P2P Matrix, and Low Bandwidth Matrix have all been paused unless there’s a major shift in circumstances - so, if you have money and you’re interested in a world where the more experimental next-generation Matrix projects progress with folks working on them as their day job, please get in touch with the Foundation.

What’s next?

While this is the first usable release of Matrix 2.0 implementations, there’s loads of work still to be done - obvious work on Matrix 2.0 includes:

  • Getting Native OIDC enabled on matrix.org, and providing migration tools to Native OIDC for existing homeservers in general
  • Reworking Sliding Sync based on the lessons learned implementing it in matrix-rust-sdk
  • Actually getting the Matrix 2.0 MSCs stabilised and matured to the point they can be approved and merged into the spec
  • Adding encrypted backups to matrix-rust-sdk
  • Reintroducing full-mesh support for Native Matrix Group VoIP calling
  • Having a big Matrix 2.0 launch party once the spec lands!

Outside of Matrix 2.0 work, other big items on the horizon include:

  • Adding Rust matrix-sdk-crypto to matrix-js-sdk, at which point all the official Matrix.org client SDKs will (at last!) be using the same stable performant E2EE implementation
  • Continuing to contribute Matrix input to the MIMI working group in IETF for Digital Markets Act interoperability
  • Working on MLS for next-generation E2EE
  • Next generation moderation tooling and capabilities
  • Account Portability and Multihomed accounts
  • …and much much more.

So: welcome to our brave new Matrix 2.0 world. We hope you’re excited about it as we are - and thanks to everyone for continuing to use Matrix and build on it. Here’s to the beginning of a whole new era!

Matthew, Amandine and the whole Matrix team.

Better authentication, session management and permissions in Matrix

21.09.2023 14:00 — General Thib

Before we explain all about our new authentication system - don't panic! This change is part of Matrix 2.0, the next step for Matrix that will be introduced in a blog post later today.

Nothing breaks

Matrix 2.0 is a reference to Matthew’s FOSDEM talk Matrix 2.0, itself a reference to the name he coined in the Matrix Summer Special 2022: evolutions of the spec that are making the Matrix experience so much better it almost feels like a different protocol. One of the major changes in this bundle is the introduction of OpenID Connect-native Matrix and its implementation matrix-authentication-service (MAS).

Don’t panic: your current setup is not at risk, you don’t urgently need to deploy the matrix-authentication-service to keep using Matrix.

Let’s walk together through what OIDC-native Matrix, what changes as compared to the Matrix we know and love, and what’s the impact for your deployment.

From OIDC-ish to OIDC

One of the most popular Matrix server implementations, Synapse, supports authentication via OIDC. This is the only mainstream server implementation to support authentication via an OpenID Connect Provider. OpenID Connect, SAML, and more generally Single Sign On (SSO) are a requirement for most companies past a certain size, as well as a security best practice.

As it is today, Synapse is more OIDC-compatible than OIDC-native. This means that it’s possible to use SSO (typically OpenID Connect) to connect to Synapse, but that’s about where the OpenID Connect adventure stops. Once you’re authenticated, Synapse generates a Matrix Access Token for your client, but that is not an OAuth2/OIDC Access Token. From your client point of view, it is doing the “Matrix SSO dance” defined by the spec, but the fact that Synapse does a login via OIDC, SAML or CAS is irrelevant to the client. Whenever your client asks Synapse for anything that requires being logged in, it sends that Matrix Access Token in the Authorization header of the http requests.

While this approach has served Matrix well, the Matrix Access Token method is reimplementing some concepts of OpenID Connect without all the benefits of thousands of developers battle testing and fixing every edge case they meet.

MSC3861, which proposes the adoption of OIDC in Matrix, is all about embracing the best of OIDC to make Matrix even better. By adopting the standard OIDC flows we allow Matrix to stand on the shoulders of another battle-tested industry standard. Not only does it improve security overall, it also unlocks new use cases for Matrix.

Unlocking use cases

The Matrix Access Tokens Matrix currently relies on are secure, but not very flexible. A unique token is granted to each and every client during user login. This Matrix Access Token is only revoked when the user manages their sessions and logs a device out. A Matrix Access Token gives full access to a Matrix Account. Session management based on Matrix Access Tokens is quite nuclear.

Using OpenID Connect for Matrix comes with three major areas of improvements:

  • Standard authentication process on every client, including on devices without a keyboard
  • Improved security with token rotation
  • Better granularity of permissions (which improves security too!)

Authenticate like you want

When relying on OIDC, the client delegates authentication to the OpenID Provider. This means that the client redirects the user to a web page on the OpenID Provider, where the user needs to authenticate. This authentication can happen through a username and password, WebAuthn (passwordless login), additional steps if you want to add MFA… and much more.

Since the authentication happens on the OpenID Provider, the client doesn’t need to support any authentication method other than “redirect the user to the OpenID Provider, and handle the result”. Once the user has authenticated against the OpenID Provider, it is going to be redirected back to its client, to allow it to retrieve an Access Token on their behalf.

During the whole process, no password was given to the client, and the client doesn’t even know how the user authenticated. All that matters to the client is that it now has an Access Token it can use to perform the regular Matrix API calls.

From the user perspective, the authentication is a very familiar process very well integrated in their password manager regardless of the client they use. They can use any client that supports OIDC, without having to worry about whether it supports every particular step of their authentication process. It’s also worth noting that matrix-authentication-service has a compatibility layer to support the m.login.password flow. This means compatibility with older clients will not break!

From the administrator perspective, it’s possible to force authentication flows (e.g. MFA), making sure the login is secure and matches their organisation’s policies. It also makes it possible to have a central management of all users' devices, including the ability to enforce policies upon them as provided by the OpenID Provider. For example, it becomes possible to the re-authentication of the user if they leave a trusted network.

From the developer perspective, neither clients nor servers have to add support for every new authentication method, existing or to come.

Element has been spearheading the effort to implement MSC3861 and matrix-authentication-service, and Element X is the first client to support them. Here is how the authentication flow and account management look like as seen from Element X iOS.

Token rotation

While current Matrix Access Token can expire thanks to MSC2918, this best practice didn’t make it to most of the clients of the ecosystem. If the access token of a user was leaked for one reason or another, they wouldn’t notice since this wouldn’t create a new session, and the leaked token would be valid forever. Please note that thanks to E2EE, attackers who gain access to a Matrix Access Token would not be able to read the encrypted content in encrypted rooms.

OpenID Connect relies on two tokens:

  • an Access Token, that is used to perform the authenticated API calls, and that expires regularly,
  • and a Refresh Token that is used in conjunction with the Access Token to rotate both.

This ensures that if the Access Token was leaked during an API call, its validity would be very limited in time. Leaking a Refresh Token will also have limited impact, since the server would notice that two different clients are trying to consume the same Refresh Token and would log the user out from devices using this token.

Principle of least privilege

Matrix is not just about apps and servers. It’s also a vibrant ecosystem of widgets, bots and various CLI to toy with. One of the strengths of Matrix has been its hackability: log into a client, dump the matrix access token, and you can hand it to a CLI or a bot for it to do things on your behalf.

While this approach is particularly convenient for development, it comes with its own lot of issues. Most of the time you don’t want the CLI or bot to be able to do everything on your behalf.

Widgets are another case where OIDC can help. While widgets are not yet part of the spec, in practice they are already commonly used. In essence, a widget is a tiny app that has access to an (unspecified) widgets API that allows it to do a limited amount of things on behalf of the user, such as sending a message in the rooms it’s in. While this has served several clients well, this can be improved. Indeed, it’s up to the client to enforce the restrictions mandated by the widgets API. This means you can’t be assured that all the clients will consistently enforce them.

With OpenID Connect, widgets can eventually become tiny embedded Matrix clients on their own, and they can get their own Access Token with explicit and granular permissions of their own. Those restrictions will be enforced by the server, who will not even be aware it’s a widget calling the API, making the experience consistent across clients. This behaviour still needs to be added to the specification, but a more OIDC-native Matrix paves the way for it.

Upgrading to use matrix-authentication-service

MSC3861 (and friends) define how the OIDC flows and concepts (e.g. token exchange, dynamic client registration) should be used in Matrix, as well as the requirements for things which need to be coordinated with the homeserver (e.g. session lifecycle management).

The goals of matrix-authentication-service (MAS) are two-fold: firstly, it provides an implementation of the MSCs to support the Matrix Specification Change (MSC) process; secondly, it provides capabilities to facilitate the transition of the Matrix ecosystem to OIDC.

Because MSC3861 is changing the technical mechanism by which your client gets access to your account it is not something that can be done by pushing a single, big button.Instead we need a transition period where both OIDC and the existing legacy Matrix authentication methods coexist so that different clients and homeservers can migrate at their own pace.

One way in which MAS facilitates this transition is by allowing deployments without an external Identity Provider (IdP) to use OIDC out-of-the-box. This means that MAS will support some of the current flows that Synapse supports, primarily in the form of password-based login. Please note those flows are not supported yet: MAS requires an external IdP for now.

Another way is that MAS allows for existing sessions and access tokens to be imported (just from Synapse so far) so that there is no need for clients to re-authenticate when a homeserver is migrated.

Because of these migration capabilities we expect MAS to be widely used, however, in keeping with the open philosophy of Matrix, we expect other implementations to exist either standalone or integrated with other OIDC providers like Keycloak or Dex.

MAS is not intended to be a fully fledged IdP solution: we suggest using a dedicated software for this if you want to do more than what is included.

Currently MAS is deployable as a sidecar service alongside the homeserver. While larger setups shouldn’t see this as a problem, it might be seen as cumbersome in smaller self-hosted setups. For the sake of convenience, the Synapse and MAS team are investigating how to bundle MAS along with Synapse natively using PyO3. We anticipate such a bundle to exist by the end of Q2 2024.

You can browse the matrix-authentication-service docs to get all the technical details and installation steps.

What happened with archive.matrix.org

04.07.2023 14:24 — General Matthew Hodgson

We launched the Matrix Public Archive publicly on June 2nd, 2023. We decided to take it down on Sunday, June 25th out of precaution after a member of OFTC staff warned us that the archive made the content of two OFTC IRC channels bridged to Matrix available on the Internet.

After investigating the issue, we determined that the Matrix Public Archive's behaviour was expected for these channels, given an IRC chanop had explicitly configured the Matrix side of the rooms to be world-readable.

Let's talk about how room visibility works in vanilla Matrix, how it works with bridges, and what are the next steps.

Continue reading…

A brand new website

15.06.2023 15:21 — General Thib
Last update: 15.06.2023 14:16

Hello federation,

TLDR: New website is coming tomorrow, your RSS reader might be disoriented during the switch.

That's right, after several months of studying, designing and implementing: we're finally going to deploy the new matrix.org website on June 16! Let's have a look back at the why and how.

I also need to thank Jonas Platte not only for his technical expertise but also for his kind support and patience. Thanks to MTRNord as well for kickstarting the project, and to the various designers involved.

Continue reading…

Introducing Third Room TP2: The Creator Update

07.06.2023 15:15 — General Matthew Hodgson

Hi all,

Back in September 2022 we launched the very first public technology preview of Third Room - our entirely open source, open standards-based platform for creating decentralised multiparty spatial apps and virtual worlds on top of Matrix.

The mission of Third Room is to ensure that a truly open and equitable platform exists for powering shared 3D environments - providing an alternative to the closed walled gardens of the bigger vendors, and generally safeguard against a repeat of the fragmented dystopia that has plagued instant messaging and VoIP systems. In short, just as Matrix aims to be the missing secure communication layer of the open Web, Third Room aims to be the spatial collaboration layer.

Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce Third Room Technology Preview 2: The Creator Update. As more and more 3D hardware enters the market, the race is on to provide tools to developers and creators so they can build on an open, vendor-agnostic platform - and in this update we’ve focused on building out the scripting, editing and authoring capabilities of Third Room to provide a solid platform for building and running collaborative 3D apps of any kind. Check out the new release at https://thirdroom.io.

As a reminder: the Third Room team is a tiny band formed by Robert, Nate and Ajay and operates outside of all the rest of our work on Matrix: the other 97% of our effort goes into making the core of Matrix amazing (particularly the underpinnings for Element X and the next generation of Matrix clients). However, Matrix is about more than just chat and VoIP, and Third Room provides an excellent showcase of Matrix’s abilities as a general purpose communication fabric.

Continue reading…

The DMA Stakeholder Workshop: Interoperability between messaging services

15.03.2023 00:00 — General Matthew Hodgson

A few weeks ago we found ourselves in Brussels to participate in the second stakeholder workshop for the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The DMA is new antitrust/competition regulation from Europe which came into force in November, whose objective is to make digital markets more competitive by forcing gatekeepers (i.e. large tech companies) to reconsider some of their anti-competitive or self-preferencing practices. Gatekeepers are defined as companies which have a clear position of influence in a given market (based on revenue / market cap / number of users thresholds), and “an entrenched and durable position”. The process for designating which companies count as gatekeepers will start in May 2023.

The DMA touches upon different key topics, from self-preferencing behaviour to app store management practices - but most importantly includes interoperability for “number-independent interpersonal communication services” (NIICS), otherwise known as chat and voice/video calling and conferencing services (social media was left out for now).

This particular workshop was focused on the latter: interoperability between messaging services, with the aim of getting the different stakeholders of the industry in the same place to discuss how the legislation could be implemented. The whole idea is to figure out a practical way in which WhatsApp could interoperate with iMessage, Google Messages and others, creating an interoperable communication network where users are no longer locked into communication silos and pick their preferred service provider without compromising on who they can talk to.

About 900 people participated online, and around 80 people were present in person: the maximum the room could hold. It was particularly fun to see representatives from the whole industry turning up in person, including folks from XMPP, MIMI (the new IETF working group on messaging interoperability), MLS, us from Matrix obviously (alongside Matrix ecosystem representatives from Beeper and NeoChat!) - all together with the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), civil society representatives (like the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV) and European Digital Rights (EDRi)), mobile network operators, local network agencies, and obviously some of those who are likely to be designated as gatekeepers, such as Meta, Apple and Google.

Continue reading…