2019 is a big year for Matrix, in the next month we will have shipped:
Matrix spec 1.0 (including the first stable release of the Server to Server Spec)
Synapse 1.0
Riot 1.0
This is huge in itself, but is really only the beginning, and now we want to grow the ecosystem as quickly as possible. This means landing a mix of new features, enhancing existing ones, some big performance improvements as well as generally making life easier for our regular users, homeserver admins and community developers.
Today we are sharing the Matrix core team’s backend roadmap. The idea is that this will make it easier for anyone to understand where the project is going, what we consider to be important, and why.
A roadmap is a set of high level projects that the team intend to work on and a rough sense of the relative priority. It is essential to focus on specific goals, which inevitably means consciously not working on other initiatives.
Our roadmap is not a delivery plan – there are explicitly no dates. The reason for this is that we know that other projects will emerge, developers will be needed to support other urgent initiatives, matrix.org use continues to grow exponentially and will require performance tweaking.
So simply, based on what we know now, this is the order we will work on our projects.
Why are we sharing it?
We already share our day to day todo list, and of course our commit history, but it can be difficult for a casual observer to see the bigger picture from such granular data. The purpose of sharing is that we want anyone from the community to understand where our priorities lie.
We are often asked ‘Why are you not working on X, it is really important’ where the answer is often ‘We agree that X is really important, but A, B and C are more important and must come first’.
The point of sharing the roadmap is to make that priority trade off more transparent and consumable.
How did we build it?
The core contributors to Synapse and Dendrite are 6 people, of 5 nationalities spread across 3 locations. After shipping the r0 release of the Server to Server spec last month we took some time to step back and have a think about what to do after Synapse 1.0 lands. This meant getting everyone in one place to talk it through.
We also had Ben (benpa) contribute from a community perspective and took input from speaking to so many of you at FOSDEM.
In the end we filled a wall with post-its, each post-it representing a sizeable project. The position of the post-it was significant in that the vertical axis being a sense of how valuable we thought the task would be, and the horizontal axis being a rough guess on how complex we considered it to be.
We found this sort of grid approach to be really helpful in determining relative priority.
After many hours and plenty of blood, sweat and tears we ended up with something we could live with and wrote it up in the shared board.
And this is written in blood right?
Not at all (it’s written in board marker). This is simply a way to express our plan of action and we are likely to make changes to it dynamically. However, this means that at any given moment, if someone wants to know what we are working on then the roadmap is the place to go.
But wait I want to know more!
Here is a video of myself and Matthew to talk you through the projects
Interesting, but I have questions …
Any feedback gratefully received, come and ask questions in #synapse or #dendrite or feel free to ping me direct at @neilj:matrix.org
Hey, everyone, today is the day we release Synapse 0.99.1.1
This release contains improved ACME support to make it even easier to get going with TLS certs on your federation end points, plus some tweaks to make the room version upgrade path easier.
Just as a reminder that the 0.99.x series is precursor for our 1.0 release (which will land in early March, exact date to be confirmed) – it is really important that all server admins are aware that self signed certificates on the Server to Server API will no longer be accepted by >= Synapse 1.0. If you have not already done so, now is the time to configure your certificate. For more info see our FAQ and if you get stuck come and join us in #Synapse.
Fix “TypeError: ‘>’ not supported” when starting without an existing certificate.
Fix a bug where an existing certificate would be reprovisoned every day. (#4648)
Synapse 0.99.1 Changelog
Features
Include m.room.encryption on invites by default (#3902)
Federation OpenID listener resource can now be activated even if federation is disabled (#4420)
Synapse’s ACME support will now correctly reprovision a certificate that approaches its expiry while Synapse is running. (#4522)
You may have heard that we recently published the first stable release of the Server to Server Spec (r0.1). The spec makes some changes which are not compatible with the protocol of the past – particularly, self-signed certificates are no longer valid for homeservers. Synapse 1.0.0 will be compliant with r0.1 and the goal of Synapse 0.99.0 is to act as a stepping stone to Synapse 1.0. Synapse 0.99.0 supports the r0.1 release of the server to server specification, but is compatible with both the legacy Matrix federation behaviour (pre-r0.1) as well as post-r0.1 behaviour, in order to allow for a smooth upgrade across the federation.
It is critical that all admins upgrade to 0.99.0 and configure a valid TLS certificate. Admins will have 1 month to do so, after which 1.0.0 will be released and those servers without a valid certificate will no longer be able to federate with >= 1.0.0 servers.
First of all, please don’t panic :) We have taken steps to make this process as simple as possible – specifically implementing ACME support to allow servers to automatically generate free Let’s Encrypt certificates if you choose to. What’s more, it is not necessary to add the certificate right away, you have at least a month to get set up.
For more details on exactly what you need to do (and also why this change is essential), we have provided an extensive FAQ as well as the Upgrade notes for Synapse
This was a huge effort! Congratulations to all involved, especially those of you in the community who contributed to spec MSCs and tested our release candidates. Thank you for bearing with us as we move the whole public Matrix Federation onto r0.1 compliant servers.
Onwards!
Changelog
Synapse v0.99.x is a precursor to the upcoming Synapse v1.0 release. It contains foundational changes to room architecture and the federation security model necessary to support the upcoming r0 release of the Server to Server API.
Features
Synapse’s cipher string has been updated to require ECDH key exchange. Configuring and generating dh_params is no longer required, and they will be ignored. (#4229)
Synapse can now automatically provision TLS certificates via ACME (the protocol used by CAs like Let’s Encrypt). (#4384, #4492, #4525, #4572, #4564, #4566, #4547, #4557)
We just got back from braving the snow in Brussels at FOSDEM 2019 – Europe’s biggest Open Source conference. I think it’s fair to say we had an amazing time, with more people than ever before wanting to hang out and talk Matrix and discuss their favourite features (and bugs)!
The big news is that we released r0.1 of Matrix’s Server-Server APIlate on Friday night – our first ever formal stable release of Matrix’s Federation API, having addressed the core of the issues which have kept Federation in beta thus far. We’ll go into more detail on this in a dedicated blog post, but this marks the first ever time that all of Matrix’s APIs have had an official stable release. All that remains before we declare Matrix out of beta is to release updates of the CS API (0.5) and possibly the IS API (0.2) and then we can formally declare the overall combination as Matrix 1.0 :D
We spoke about SS API r0.1 at length in our main stage FOSDEM talk on Saturday – as well as showing off the Riot Redesign, the E2E Encryption Endgame and giving an update on the French Government deployment of Matrix and the focus it’s given us on finally shipping Matrix 1.0! For those who weren’t there or missed the livestream, here’s the talk! Slides are available here.
Full house for @ara4n talking about @matrixdotorg and the French State @fosdem It was a packed presentation full of lots exciting progress demos. So sorry for practically yanking you offstage in the end! pic.twitter.com/idshDcSRhv
Then, on Sunday we had the opportunity to have a quick 20 minute talk in the Real Time Comms dev room, where we gave a tour of some of the work we’ve been doing recently to scale Matrix down to working on incredibly low bandwidth networks (100bps or less). It’s literally the opposite of the Matrix 1.0 / France talk in that it’s a quick deep dive into a very specific problem area in Matrix – so, if you’ve been looking forward to Matrix finally having a better transport than HTTPS+JSON, here goes! Slides are available here.
Huge thanks to everyone who came to the talks, and everyone who came to the stand or grabbed us for a chat! FOSDEM is an amazing way to be reminded in person that folks care about Matrix, and we’ve come away feeling more determined than ever to make Matrix as great as possible and provide a protocol+network which will replace the increasingly threatened proprietary communication silos. :)
Since joining the core team as Developer Advocate last year it’s been quite a ride. One of the best things about the job is getting the chance to talk to so many people about their projects and what they would like to see happen in the matrix ecosystem. With so much going on, I just want to say thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me and share some of my personal highlights, as I recall them, from 2018!
Clients
Fractal was featured in the very first TWIM, announcing v1.26. Since then, the team have hosted two IRL hackfest events (Strasbourg and Seville – where to next, Stockholm? Salisbury?), engaged two GSOC students and continued to push out releases. At this point, Fractal is a full-featured Matrix client for GNOME.
Matrique became Spectral, and is generally awesome. Apparently the name “Matrique” was chosen because it sounds French, but those who speak the language well revealed that this name was not ideal! The project was re-named “Spectral”, and is going strong. I really appreciate the multi-user facility! It’s a great looking client, and runs great on macOS too (protip: get more attention from /me by providing a macOS build…)
On which subject, Seaglass is a native macOS client. First announced in June, this client supports E2EE rooms (via matrix-ios-sdk), and is also available on homebrew.
Ubuntu Touch has the most Matrix clients per-user of any platform. UT epitomises the resilience and collaborative spirit of Open Source. It’s a true community maintenance effort, and is as friendly a community as you might meet. uMatriks came first, but it’s FluffyChat that prompted me to install it on my battered old OnePlus One. FluffyChat is now extremely full-featured, with E2EE support being actively discussed.
In the command line, gomuks appeared and quickly became a competent client, but in terms of sheer enthusiasm and momentum, I must give commendation to matrix-client.el, a newly revived mode for Emacs which turns your editor/OS into a great Matrix Client. I enjoyed using it enough that it began to change my mind about using emacs. Laptops have more than 8mb memory these days anyway.
A culture of bots
There is a tendency in the community to build a bot for everything and anything. This has reached the point where there are multiple flairs available depending on what bots you like to make (silly vs serious.)
TravisR was perhaps the first person I saw to get the obsession, creating
In June tulir started maubot, a plugin-based bot system built in Python, which now also has a management UI.
All bridges lead to Matrix
Or from Matrix, depending on which way you want to send the message.
Around May, I started to notice another obsession brewing in the community. Bridging is a core part of the Matrix mission, but it was around this time I started seeing it in the wild.
Summer 2018 Half-Shot began working in the Matrix core team, and was hugely productive in maintaining and developing the bridge infrastructure for matrix.org. IRC bridging is far more stable and reliable now than it was a year ago. And yet there are still more bridges – too many to list, so I’m picking the ones I’ve used and enjoyed.
Discord is bridged by matrix-appservice-discord, handled by Half-Shot, aided and abetted by anoa but with a new maintainer this year, Sorunome. This bridge is now feature-rich and sits at v0.3.1.
SMSMatrix, a phone-hosted bridge is simple and works great for SMS bridging.
Libraries, SDKs, Frameworks
I enjoyed using matrix-js-bot-sdk for building elizabot (more coverage needed for that!), and the SDK recently received support for application services.
In April, kitsune announced v0.2 of libqmatrixclient describing it as “the first one more or less functional and stable” – confidence! This library now powers both Quaternion and Spectral. QMatrixClient has continued to get updates, plus features including lazy loading and VoIP signalling.
There are a few libs I want to pay more attention to this year, starting with tulir‘s maubot now that it has been rewritten in Python. I’m also excited to see jmsdk, part of ma1uta‘s broader ecosystem of Matrix tooling – a Java-based SDK.
Ruma Resurrection
Until around June, Ruma was receiving regular updates. There was a pause as the team waited for Rust async/await to land, and also to get some stability in the Matrix Spec. Still waiting on Rust, but now that the Matrix Spec is stabilising, Ruma is showing signs of life too. I have also been watching other homeserver projects begin to restart, which makes for a great start to 2019.
DSN Traveller by Florian
Matrix was featured as part of a Master’s thesis by Florian Jacob.
DSN Traveller tries to get a rough overview of how the Matrix network is structured today. It records how many rooms it finds, how many users and servers take part in those rooms, and how they relate to each other, meaning how many users a server has and of how many rooms it is part of.
Synapse dominates the homeserver space right now, so if you want to host your own homeserver today it’s the obvious choice. Too great a variety of installation guides was doing more harm than good, so Stefan took the initiative to create a definitive community-driven Synapse installation guide, including a room to discuss and improve the text. Find the guide linked from here, and chat about the guide in #synapseguide:matrix.org.
I want to use Matrix, and I want to host my own homeserver. As such, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is a project I absolutely love. It uses Synapse docker images from the Matrix core team, and combines them with Ansible playbooks written and organised by Slavi. It lets you quickly deploy everything needed for a Synapse homeserver, and it’s simple enough that even I can use it.
Construct, a homeserver implementation in C++ began successfully federating with Matrix, work progressed from around April/May.
Having a Matrix-native mode for shields.io (those counter/indicator images you often see at the top of repos) seems like something petty at first, but it’s actually a great indicator of the importance of Matrix from the outside. Plus, I love seeing the images at the top of different repos. Thanks Brendan for helping this along.
Two students worked on Matrix-related projects during GSOC 2018.
Thanks for a great 2018. There was so much to learn about, so much to write about, and so many great community members to meet and chat to! If I didn’t mention your project, I’m sorry to have been either forgetful or to not be able to include everything.
If you think I’ve missed something, or if there’s a project I should have included rather than another, or even if you just disagree with my choices, let’s discuss it in #twim:matrix.org. See you there, and let’s all parade ahead to a productive, open, interoperable 2019!
On Thursday Jan 10th we released a Critical Security Update (Synapse 0.34.0.1/0.34.1.1), which fixes a serious security bug in Synapse 0.34.0 and earlier. Many deployments have now upgraded to 0.34.0.1 or 0.34.1.1, and we now consider it appropriate to disclose more information about the issue, to provide context and encourage the remaining affected servers to upgrade as soon as possible.
In Synapse 0.11 (Nov 2015) we added a configuration parameter called “macaroon_secret_key” which relates to our use of macaroons in authentication. Macaroons are authentication tokens which must be signed by the server which generates them, to prevent them being forged by attackers. “macaroon_secret_key” defines the key which is used for this signature, and it must therefore be kept secret to preserve the security of the server.
If the option is not set, Synapse will attempt to derive a secret key from other secrets specified in the configuration file. However, in all versions of Synapse up to and including 0.34.0, this process was faulty and a predictable value was used instead.
So if, your homeserver.yaml does not contain a macaroon_secret_key, you need to upgrade to 0.34.1.1 or 0.34.0.1 or Debian 0.34.0-3~bpo9+2 immediately to prevent the risk of account hijacking.
The vulnerability affects any Synapse installation which does not have a macaroon_secret_key setting. For example, the Debian and Ubuntu packages from Matrix.org, Debian and Ubuntu include a configuration file without an explicit macaroon_secret_key and must upgrade. Anyone who hasn’t updated their config since Nov 2015 or who grandfathered their config from the Debian/Ubuntu packages will likely also be affected.
We are not aware of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, but if you are running an affected server it may still be wise to check your synapse’s user_ips database table for any unexpected access to your server’s accounts. You could also check your accounts’ device lists (shown under Settings in Riot) for unexpected devices, although this is not as reliable as an attacker could cover their tracks to remove unexpected devices.
We’ll publish a full post-mortem of the issue once we are confident that most affected servers have been upgraded.
We’d like to apologise for the inconvenience caused by this – especially to folks who upgraded since Friday who were in practice not affected. Due to the nature of the issue we wanted to minimise details about the issue until people had a chance to upgrade. We also did not follow a planned disclosure procedure because Synapse 0.34.1 already unintentionally disclosed the existence of the bug by fixing it (causing the logout bug for affected users which led us to pull the original Synapse 0.34.1 release).
On the plus side, we are approaching the end of beta for Synapse, and going forwards hope to see much better stability and security across the board.
After releasing Synapse v0.34.1, we have become aware of a security vulnerability affecting all previous versions (CVE-2019-5885). v0.34.1 closed the vulnerability but, in some cases, caused users to be logged out of their clients, so we do not recommend 0.34.1 for production use.
Today we release two mitigating versions v0.34.0.1 and v0.34.1.1. Both versions close the vulnerability and will not cause users to be logged out. All installations should be upgraded to one or other immediately.
Admins who would otherwise upgrade to v0.34.1 (or those that have already done so) should upgrade to v0.34.1.1.
Admins on v0.34.0, who do not wish to bring in new non-security related behaviour, should upgrade to v0.34.0.1.
We will publish more details of the vulnerability once admins have had a chance to upgrade. To our knowledge the vulnerability has not been exploited in the wild.
Many thanks for your patience, we are moving ever closer to Synapse reaching v1.0, and fixes like this one edge us ever closer.
Thanks also to the package maintainers who have coordinated with us to ensure distro packages are available for a speedy upgrade!
It’s that time again where we break out the mince pies and brandy butter (at least for those of us in the UK) and look back on the year to see how far Matrix has come, as well as anticipate what 2019 may bring!
Overview
It’s fair to say that 2018 has been a pretty crazy year. We have had one overriding goal: to take the funding we received in January, stabilise and freeze the protocol and get it and the reference implementations out of beta and to a 1.0 – to provide a genuinely open and decentralised mainstream alternative to the likes of Slack, Discord, WhatsApp etc. What’s so crazy about that, you might ask?
Well, in parallel with this we’ve also seen adoption of Matrix accelerating ahead of our dev plan at an unprecedented speed: with France selecting Matrix to power the communication infrastructure of its whole public sector – first trialling over the summer, and now confirmed for full roll-out as of a few weeks ago. Meanwhile there are several other similar-sized projects on the horizon which we can’t talk about yet. We’ve had the growing pains of establishing New Vector as a startup in order to hire the core team and support these projects. We’ve launched Modular to provide professional-quality SaaS Matrix hosting for the wider community and help fund the team. And most importantly, we’ve also been establishing the non-profit Matrix.org Foundation to formalise the open governance of the Matrix protocol and protect and isolate it from any of the for-profit work.
However: things have just about come together. Almost all the spec work for 1.0 is done and we are now aiming to get a 1.0 released in time by the end of January (in time for FOSDEM). Meanwhile Synapse has improved massively in terms of performance and stability (not least having migrated over to Python 3); Riot’s spectacular redesign is now available for testing right now; E2E encryption is more stable than ever with the usability rework landing as we speak. And we’ve even got a full rewrite of Riot/Android in the wings.
But it’s certainly been an interesting ride. Longer-term spec work has been delayed by needing to apply band-aids to mitigate abuse of the outstanding issues. Riot redesign was pushed back considerably due to prioritising Riot performance over UX. The E2E UX work has forced us to consider E2E holistically… which does not always interact well with structuring the dev work into bite-sized chunks. Dendrite has generally been idling whilst we instead pour most of our effort into getting to 1.0 on Synapse (rather than diluting 1.0 work across both projects). These tradeoffs have been hard to make, but hopefully we have chosen the correct path in the end.
Overall, as we approach 1.0, the project is looking better than ever – hopefully everyone has seen both Riot and Synapse using less RAM and being more responsive and stable, E2E being more reliable, and anyone who has played with the Riot redesign beta should agree that it is light-years ahead of yesterday’s Riot and something which can genuinely surpass today’s centralised proprietary incumbents. And that is unbelievably exciting :D
We’d like to thank everyone for continuing to support Matrix – especially our Patreon & Liberapay supporters, whose donations continue to be critical for helping fund the core dev team, and also those who are supporting the project indirectly by hosting homeservers with Modular. We are going to do everything humanly possible to ship 1.0 over the coming weeks, and then the sky will be the limit!
Before going into what else 2019 will hold, however, let’s take the opportunity to give a bit more detail on the various core team projects which landed in 2018…
France
DINSIC (France’s Ministry of Digital, IT & Comms) have been busy building out their massive cross-government Matrix deployment and custom Matrix client throughout most of the year. After the announcement in April, this started off with an initial deployment over the summer, and is now moving towards the full production rollout, as confirmed at the Paris Open Source Summit a few weeks ago by Mounir Mahjoubi, the Secretary of State of Digital. All the press coverage about this ended up in French, with the biggest writeup being at CIO Online, but the main mention of Matrix (badly translated from French) is:
Denouncing the use of tools such as WhatsApp; a practice that has become commonplace within ministerial offices, Mounir Mahjoubi announced the launch in production of Tchap, based on Matrix and Riot: an instant messaging tool that will be provided throughout the administrations. So, certainly, developing a product can have a certain cost. Integrating it too. “Free is not always cheaper but it’s always more transparent,” admitted the Secretary of State.
The project really shows off Matrix at its best, with up to 60 different deployments spread over different ministries and departments; multiple clusters per Ministry; end-to-end encryption enabled by default (complete with e2e-aware antivirus scanning); multiple networks for different classes of traffic; and the hope of federating with the public Matrix network once the S2S API is finalised and suitable border gateways are available. It’s not really our project to talk about, but we’ll try to share as much info as we can as roll-out continues.
The Matrix Specification
A major theme throughout the year has been polishing the Matrix Spec itself for its first full stable release, having had more than enough time to see which bits work in practice now and which bits need rethinking. This all kicked off with the creation of the Matrix Spec Change process back in May, which provides a formal process for reviewing and accepting contributions from anyone into the spec. Getting the balance right between agility and robustness has been quite tough here, especially pre-1.0 where we’ve needed to move rapidly to resolve the remaining long-lived sticking points. However, a process like this risks encouraging the classic “Perfect is the Enemy of Good” problem, as all and sundry jump in to apply their particular brand of perfectionism to the spec (and/or the process around it) and risk smothering it to death with enthusiasm. So we’ve ended up iterating a few times on the process and hopefully now converged on an approach which will work for 1.0 and beyond. If you haven’t checked out the current proposals guide please give it a look, and feel free to marvel at all the MSCs in flight. You can also see a quick and dirty timeline of all the MSC status changes since we introduced the process, to get an idea of how it’s all been progressing.
In August we had a big sprint to cut stable “r0” releases of all the APIs of the spec which had not yet reached a stable release (i.e. all apart from the Client-Server API, which has been stable since Dec 2015 – hence in part the large number of usable independent Matrix clients relative to the other bits of the ecosystem). In practice, we managed to release 3 out of the 4 remaining APIs – but needed more time to solve the remaining blocking issues with the Server-Server API. So since August (modulo operational and project distractions) we’ve been plugging away on the S2S API.
The main blocking issue for a stable S2S API has been State Resolution. This is the fundamental algorithm used to determine the state of a given room whenever a race or partition happens between the servers participating in it. For instance: if Alice kicks Bob on her server at the same time as Charlie ops Bob on his server, who should win? It’s vital that all servers reach the same conclusion as to the state of the room, and we don’t want servers to have to replicate a full copy of the room’s history (which could be massive) to reach a consistent conclusion. Matrix’s original state resolution algorithm dates back to the initial usable S2S implementation at the beginning of 2015 – but over time deficiencies in the algorithm became increasingly apparent. The most obvious issue is the “Hotel California” bug, where users can be spontaneously re-joined to a room they’ve previously left if the room’s current state is merged with an older copy of the room on another server and the ‘wrong’ version wins the conflict – a so-called state-reset.
After a lot of thought we ended up proposing an all new State Resolution algorithm in July 2018, nicknamed State Resolution Reloaded. This extends the original algorithm to consider the ‘auth chain’ of state events when performing state resolution (i.e. the sequence of events that a given state event cites as evidence of its validity) – as well as addressing a bunch of other issues. For those wishing to understand in more detail, there’s the MSC itself, the formal terse description of the algorithm now merged into the unstable S2S spec – or alternatively there’s an excellent step-by-step explanation and guided example from uhoreg (warning: contains Haskell :) Or you can watch Erik and Matthew try to explain it all on Matrix Live back in July.
Since the initial proposal in July, the algorithm has been proofed out in a test jig, iterated on some more to better specify how to handle rejected events, implemented in Synapse, and is now ready to roll. The only catch is that to upgrade to it we’ve had to introduce the concept of room versioning, and to flush out historical issues we require you to re-create rooms to upgrade them to the new resolution algorithm. Getting the logistics in place for this is a massive pain, but we’ve got an approach now which should be sufficient. Clients will be free to smooth over the transition in the UI as gracefully as possible (and in fact Riot has this already hooked up). So: watch this space as v2 rooms with all-new state resolution in the coming weeks!
Once these land and are implemented in Synapse over the coming weeks, we will be able to finally declare a 1.0!
Also on the spec side of things, it’s worth noting that a lot of effort went into improving performance for clients in the form of the Lazy Loading Members MSC. This ended up consuming a lot of time over the summer as we updated Synapse and the various matrix-*-sdks (and thus Riot) to only calculate and send details to the clients about members who are currently talking in a room, whereas previously we sent the entire state of the room to the client (even including users who had left). The end result however is a 3-5x reduction in RAM on Riot, and a 3-5x speedup on initial sync. The current MSC is currently being merged as we speak into the main spec (thanks Kitsune!) for inclusion in upcoming CS API 0.5.
The Matrix.org Foundation (CIC!)
Alongside getting the open spec process up and running, we’ve been establishing The Matrix.org Foundation as an independent non-profit legal entity responsible for neutrally safeguarding the Matrix spec and evolution of the protocol. This kicked off in June with the “Towards Open Governance” blog post, and continued with the formal incorporation of The Matrix.org Foundation in October. Since then, we’ve spent a lot of time with the non-profit lawyers evolving MSC1318 into the final Articles of Association (and other guidelines) for the Foundation. This work is basically solved now; it just needs MSC1318 to be updated with the conclusions (which we’re running late on, but is top of Matthew’s MSC todo list).
In other news, we have confirmation that the Community Interest Company (CIC) status for The Matrix.org Foundation has been approved – this means that the CIC Regulator has independently reviewed the initial Articles of Association and approved that they indeed lock the mission of the Foundation to be non-profit and to act solely for the good of the wider online community. In practice, this means that the Foundation will be formally renamed The Matrix.org Foundation C.I.C, and provides a useful independent safeguard to ensure the Foundation remains on track.
The remaining work on the Foundation is:
Update and land MSC1318, particularly on clarifying the relationship between the legal Guardians (Directors) of the Foundation and the technical members of the core spec team, and how funds of the Foundation will be handled.
Update the Articles of Association of the Foundation based on the end result of MSC1318
Transfer any Matrix.org assets over from New Vector to the Foundation. Given Matrix’s code is all open source, there isn’t much in the way of assets – we’re basically talking about the matrix.org domain and website itself.
Introduce the final Guardians for the Foundation.
We’ll keep you posted with progress as this lands over the coming months.
Riot
2018 has been a bit of a chrysalis year for Riot: the vast majority of work has been going into the massive redesign we started in May to improve usability & cosmetics, performance, stability, and E2E encryption usability improvements. We’ve consciously spent most of the year feature frozen in order to polish what we already have, as we’ve certainly been guilty in the past of landing way too many features without necessarily applying the needed amount of UX polish.
However, as of today, we’re super-excited to announce that Riot’s redesign is at the point where the intrepid can start experimenting with it – in fact, internally most of the team has switched over to dogfooding (testing) the redesign as of a week or so ago. Just shut down your current copy of Riot/Web or Desktop and go to https://riot.im/experimental instead if you want to experiment (we don’t recommend running both at the same time). Please note that it is still work-in-progress and there’s a lot of polish still to land and some cosmetic bugs still hanging around, but it’s definitely at the point of feeling better than the old app. Most importantly, please provide feedback (by hitting the lifesaver-ring button at the bottom left) to let us know how you get on. See the Riot blog for more details!
Meanwhile, on the performance and stability side of things – Lazy Loading (see above) made a massive difference to performance on all platforms; shrinking RAM usage by 3-5x and similarly speeding up launch and initial sync times. Ironically, this ended up pushing back the redesign work, but hopefully the performance improvements will have been noticeable in the interim. We also switched the entire rich text composer from using Facebook’s Draft.js library to instead use Slate.js (which has generally been a massive improvement for stability and maintainability, although took *ages* to land – huge thanks to t3chguy for getting it over the line). Meanwhile Travis has been blitzing through a massive list of key “First Impression” bugs to ensure that as many of Riot’s most glaring usability gotchas are solved.
We also welcomed ever-popular Stickers to the fold – the first instance of per-account rather than per-room widgets, which ended up requiring a lot of new infrastructure in both Riot and the underlying integration manager responsible for hosting the widgets. But judging by how popular they are, the effort seems to be worth it – and paves the way for much more exciting interactive widgets and integrations in future!
An unexpectedly large detour/distraction came in the form of GDPR back in May – we spent a month or so running around ensuring that both Riot and Matrix are GDPR compliant (including the necessary legal legwork to establish how GDPR even applies to a decentralised technology like Matrix). If you missed all that fun, you can read about it here. Hopefully we won’t have to do anything like that again any time soon…
And finally: on the mobile side, much of the team has been distracted helping out France with their Matrix deployment. However, we’ve been plugging away on Riot/Mobile, keeping pace with the development on Riot/Web – but most excitingly, we’ve also found time to experiment with a complete rewrite of Riot/Android in Kotlin, using Realm and Rx (currently nicknamed Riot X). The rewrite was originally intended as a test-jig for experimenting with the redesign on mobile, but it’s increasingly becoming a fully fledged Matrix client… which launches and syncs over 5x faster than today’s Riot/Android. If you’re particularly intrepid you should be able to run the app by checking out the project in Android Studio and hitting ‘run’. We expect the rewrite to land properly in the coming months – watch this space for progress!
E2E Encryption
One of the biggest projects this year has been to get E2E encryption out of beta and turned on by default. Now, whilst the encryption itself in Matrix has been cryptographically robust since 2016 – its usability has been minimal at best, and we’d been running around polishing the underlying implementation rather than addressing the UX. However, this year that changed, as we opened a war on about 6 concurrent battlefronts to address the remaining issues. These are:
Holistic UX. Designing a coherent, design-led UX across all of the encryption and key-management functionality. Nad (who joined Matrix as a fulltime Lead UI/UX designer in August) has been leading the charge on this – you can see a preview of the end result here. Meanwhile, Dave and Ryan are working through implementing it as we speak.
Decryption failures (UISIs). Whenever something goes wrong with E2E encryption, the symptoms are generally the same: you find yourself unable to decrypt other people’s messages. We’ve been plugging away chasing these down – for instance, switching from localStorage to IndexedDB in Riot/Web for storing encryption state (to make it harder for multiple tabs to collide and corrupt your encryption state); providing mechanisms to unwedge Olm sessions which have got corrupted (e.g. by restoring from backup); and many others. We also added full telemetry to track the number of UISIs people are seeing in practice – and the good news is that over the course of the year their occurrence has been steadily reducing. The bad news is that there are still some edge cases left: so please, whenever you fail to decrypt a message, please make sure you submit a bug report and debug logs from *both* the sender and receiving device. The end is definitely in sight on these, however, and good news is other battlefronts will also help mitigate UISIs.
Incremental Key Backup. Previously, if you only used one device (e.g. your phone) and you lost that phone, you would lose all your E2E history unless you were in the habit of explicitly manually backing up your keys. Nowadays, we have the ability to optionally let users encrypt their keys with a passphrase (or recovery key) and constantly upload them to the server for safe keeping. This was a significant chunk of work, but has actually landed already in Riot/Web and Riot/iOS, but is hidden behind a “Labs” feature flag in Settings whilst we test it and sort out the final UX.
Cross-signing Keys. Previously, the only way to check whether you were talking to a legitimate user or an imposter was to independently compare the fingerprints of the keys of the device they claim to be using. In the near future, we will let users prove that they own their devices by signing them with a per-user identity key, so you only have to do this check once. We’ve actually already implemented one iteration of cross-signing, but this allowed arbitrary devices for a given user to attest each other (which creates a directed graph of attestations, and associated problems with revocations), hence switching to a simpler approach.
Improved Verification. Verifying keys by manually comparing elliptic key fingerprints is incredibly cumbersome and tedious. Instead, we have proposals for using Short Authentication String comparisons and QR-code scanning to simplify the process. uhoreg is currently implementing these as we speak :)
Search. Solving encrypted search is Hard, but t3chguy did a lot of work earlier in the year to build out matrix-search: essentially a js-sdk bot which you can host, hand your keys to, and will archive your history using a golang full-text search engine (bleve) and expose a search interface that replaces Synapse’s default one. Of all the battlefronts this one is progressing the least right now, but the hope is to integrate it into Riot/Desktop or other clients so that folks who want to index all their conversations have the means to do so. On the plus side, all the necessary building blocks are available thanks to t3chguy’s hacking.
So, TL;DR: E2E is hard, but the end is in sight thanks to a lot of blood, sweat and tears. It’s possible that we may have opened up too many battlefronts in finishing it off rather than landing stuff gradually. But it should be transformative when it all lands – and we’ll finally be able to turn it on by default for private conversations. Again, we’re aiming to pull this together by the end of January.
Separately, we’ve been keeping a close eye on MLS – the IETF’s activity around standardising scalable group E2E encryption. MLS has a lot of potential and could provide algorithmic improvements over Olm & Megolm (whist paving the way for interop with other MLS-encrypted comms systems). But it’s also quite complicated, and is at risk of designing out support of decentralised environments. For now, we’re obviously focusing on ensuring that Matrix is rock solid with Olm & Megolm, but once we hit that 1.0 we’ll certainly be experimenting a bit with MLS too.
Homeservers
The story of the Synapse team in 2018 has been one of alternating between solving scaling and performance issues to support the ever-growing network (especially the massive matrix.org server)… and dealing with S2S API issues; both in terms of fixing the design of State Resolution, Room Versioning etc (see the Spec section above) and doing stop-gap fixes to the current implementation.
Focusing on the performance side of things, the main wins have been:
Splitting yet more functionality out into worker processes which can scale independently of the master Synapse process.
Yet more profiling and optimisation (particularly caching). Between this and the worker split-out we were able to resolve the performance ceiling that we hit over the summer, and as of right now matrix.org feels relatively snappy.
Lazy Loading Members.
Python 3. As everyone should have seen by now, Synapse is now Python 3 by default as of 0.34, which provides significant RAM and CPU improvements across the board as well as a path forwards given Python 2’s planned demise at the end of 2019. If you’re not running your Synapse on Python 3 today, you are officially doing it wrong.
There are also some major improvements which haven’t fully landed yet:
State compression. We have a new algorithm for storing room state which is ~10x more efficient than the current one. We’ll be migrating to it in by default in future. If you’re feeling particularly intrepid you can actually manually use it today (but we don’t recommend it yet).
Incremental state resolution. Before we got sucked into redesigning state resolution in general, Erik came up with a proof that it’s possible to memoize state resolution and incrementally calculate it whenever state is resolved in a room rather than recalculate it from scratch each time (as is the current implementation). This would be a significant performance improvement, given non-incremental state res can consume a lot of CPU (making everything slow down when there are lots of room extremities to resolve), and can consume a lot of RAM and has been one of the reasons that synapse’s RAM usage can sometimes spike badly. The good news is that the new state res algorithm was designed to also work in this manner. The bad news is that we haven’t yet got back to implementing it yet, given the new algorithm is only just being rolled out now.
Chunks. Currently, Synapse models all events in a room as being part of a single DAG, which can be problematic if you can see lots of disconnected sections of the DAG (e.g. due to intermittent connectivity somewhere in the network), as Synapse will frantically try to resolve all these disconnected sections of DAG together. Instead, a better solution is to explicitly model these sections of DAG as separate entities called Chunks, and not try to resolve state between disconnected Chunks but instead consider them independent fragments of the room – and thus simplify state resolution calculations significantly. It also fixes an S2S API design flaw where previously we trusted the server to state the ordering (depth) of events they provided; with chunks, the receiving server can keep track of that itself by tracking a DAG of chunks (as well as the normal event DAG within the chunks). Now, most of the work for this happened already, but is currently parked until new state res has landed.
Meanwhile, over on Dendrite, we made the conscious decision to get 1.0 out the door on Synapse first rather than trying to implement and iterate on the stuff needed for 1.0 on both Synapse & Dendrite simultaneously. However, Dendrite has been ticking along thanks to work from Brendan, Anoa and APWhitehat – and the plan is to use it for more niche homeserver work at first; e.g. constrained resource devices (Dendrite uses 5-10x less RAM than Synapse on Py3), clientside homeservers, experimental routing deployments, etc. In the longer term we expect it to grow into a fully fledged HS though!
Bridging
2018 was a bit of a renaissance for Bridging, largely thanks to Half-Shot coming on board in the Summer to work on IRC bridging and finally get to the bottom of the stability issues which plagued Freenode for the previous, uh, few years. Meanwhile the Slack bridge got its first ever release – and more recently there’s some Really Exciting Stuff happening with matrix-appservice-purple; a properly usable bridge through to any protocol that libpurple can speak… and as of a few days ago also supports *native* XMPP bridging via XMPP.js. There’ll probably be a dedicated blogpost about all of this in the new year, especially when we deploy it all on Matrix.org. Until then, the best bet is to learn more is to watch last week’s Matrix Live and hear it all first hand.
Modular
One of the biggest newcomers of 2018 was the launch of Modular.im in October – the world’s first commercial Matrix hosting service. Whilst (like Riot), Modular isn’t strictly-speaking a Matrix.org project – it feels appropriate to mention it here, not least because it’s helping directly fund the core Matrix dev team.
So far Modular has seen a lot of interest from folks who want to spin up a super-speedy dedicated homeserver run by us rather than having to spend the time to build one themselves – or folks who have yet to migrate from IRC and want a better-than-IRC experience which still bridges well. One of the nice bits is that the servers are still decentralised and completely operationally independent of one another, and there have been a bunch of really nice refinements since launch, including the ability to point your own DNS at the server; matrix->matrix migration tools; with custom branding and other goodness coming soon. If you want one-click Matrix hosting, please give Modular a go :)
Right now we’re promoting Modular mainly to existing Matrix users, but once the Riot redesign is finished you should expect to see some very familiar names popping up on the platform :D
TWIM
Unless you were living under a rock, you’ll hopefully have also realised that 2018 was the year that brought us This Week In Matrix (TWIM) – our very own blog tracking all the action across the whole Matrix community on a weekly basis. Thank you to everyone who contributes updates, and to Ben for editing it each week. Go flip through the archives to find out what’s been going on in the wider community over the course of the year! (This blog post is already way too long without trying to cover the rest of the ecosystem too :)
Shapes of Things to Come
Finally, a little Easter egg (it is Christmas, after all) for anyone crazy enough to have read this far: The eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that one of our accepted talks for FOSDEM 2019 is “Breaking the 100bps barrier with Matrix” in the Real Time Communications devroom. We don’t want to spoil the full surprise, but here’s a quick preview of some of the more exotic skunkworks we’ve been doing on low-bandwidth routing and transports recently. Right now it shamelessly assumes that you’re running within a trusted network, but once we solve that it will of course be be proposed as an MSC for Matrix proper. A full write-up and code will follow, but for now, here’s a mysterious video…
(If you’re interested in running Matrix over low-bandwidth networks, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you…)
2019
So, what will 2019 bring?
In the short term, as should be obvious from the above, our focus is on:
r0 spec releases across the board (aka Matrix 1.0)
Implementing them in Synapse
Landing the Riot redesign
Landing all the new E2E encryption UX and features
Finalising the Matrix.org Foundation
However, beyond that, there’s a lot of possible options on the table in the medium term:
Reworking and improving Communities/Groups.
Reactions.
E2E-encrypted Search
Filtering. (empowering users to filter out rooms & content they’re not interested in).
Extensible events.
Editable messages.
Extensible Profiles (we’ve actually been experimenting with this already).
Threading.
Landing the Riot/Android rewrite
Scaling synapse via sharding the master process
Bridge UI for discovery of users/rooms and bridge status
Considering whether to do a similar overhaul of Riot/iOS
Bandwidth-efficient transports
Bandwidth-efficient routing
Getting Dendrite to production.
Inline widgets (polls etc)
Improving VoIP over Matrix.
Adding more bridges, and improving the current ones..
Account portability
Replacing MXIDs with public keys
In the longer term, options include:
Shared-code cross-platform client SDKs (e.g. sharing a native core library between matrix-{js,ios,android}-sdk)
Matrix daemons (e.g. running an always-on client as a background process in your OS which apps can connect to via a lightweight CS API)
Push notifications via Matrix (using a daemon-style architecture)
Clientside homeservers (i.e. p2p matrix) – e.g. compiling Dendrite to WASM and running it in a service worker.
Experimenting with MLS for E2E Encryption
Storing and querying more generic data structures in Matrix (e.g. object trees; scene graphs)
Alternate use cases for VR, IoT, etc.
Obviously we’re not remotely going to do all of that in 2019, but this serves to give a taste of the possibilities on the menu post-1.0; we’ll endeavour to publish a more solid roadmap when we get to that point.
And on that note, it’s time to call this blogpost to a close. Thanks to anyone who read this far, and thank you, as always, for flying Matrix and continuing to support the project. The next few months should be particularly fun; all the preparation of 2018 will finally pay off :)
Matrix’s reference homeserver, Synapse, is written in Python and uses the Twisted networking framework to power its bitslinging across the Internet. The Python version used has been strictly Python 2.7, the last supported version of Python 2, but as of this week that changes! Since Twisted and our other upstream dependencies now support the newest version of Python, Python 3, we are now able to finish the jump and port Synapse to use it by default. The port has been done in a backwards compatible way, written in a subset of Python that is usable in both Python 2 and Python 3, meaning your existing Synapse installs still work on Python 2, while preparing us for a Python 3 future.
Why port?
Porting Synapse to Python 3 prepares Synapse for a post-Python 2 world, currently scheduled for 2020. After the 1st of January in 2020, Python 2 will no longer be supported by the core Python developers and no bugfixes (even critical security ones) will be issued. As the security of software depends very much on the runtime and libraries it is running on top of, this means that by then all Python 2 software in use should have moved to Python 3 or other runtimes.
The Python 3 port has benefits other than just preparing for the End of Life of Python 2.7. Successive versions of Python 3 have improved the standard library, provided newer and clearer syntax for asynchronous code, added opt-in static typing to reduce bugs, and contained incremental performance and memory management improvements. These features, once Synapse stops supporting Python 2, can then be fully utilised to make Synapse’s codebase clearer and more performant. One bonus that we get immediately, though, is Python 3’s memory compaction of Unicode strings. Rather than storing as UCS-2/UTF-16 or UCS-4/UTF-32, it will instead store it in the smallest possible representation giving a 50%-75% memory improvement for strings only containing Latin-1 characters, such as nearly all dictionary keys, hashes, IDs, and a large proportion of messages being processed from English speaking countries. Non-English text will also see a memory improvement, as it can be commonly stored in only two bytes instead of the four in a UCS-4 “wide” Python 2 build.
Editor’s note: If you were wondering how this fits in with Dendrite (the next-gen golang homeserver): our plan is to use Synapse as the reference homeserver for all the current work going on with landing a 1.0 release of the Matrix spec: it makes no sense to try to iterate and converge on 1.0 on both Synapse and Dendrite in parallel. In order to prove that the 1.0 spec is indeed fit for purpose we then also need Synapse to exit beta and hit a 1.0 too, hence the investment to get it there. It’s worth noting that over the last year we’ve been plugging away solidly improving Synapse in general (especially given the increasing number of high-profile deployments out there), so we’re committed to getting Synapse to a formal production grade release and supporting it in the long term. Meanwhile, Dendrite development is still progressing – currently acting as a place to experiment with more radical blue-sky architectural changes, especially in low-footprint or even clientside homeservers. We expect it to catch up with Synapse once 1.0 is out the door; and meanwhile Synapse is increasingly benefiting from performance work inspired by Dendrite.
When will the port be released?
The port is has been released in a “production ready” form in Synapse 0.34.0, supporting Python 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. This will work on installations with and without workers.
What’s it like in the real world?
Beta testers of the Python 3 port have reported lower memory usage, including lower memory “spikes” and slower memory growth. You can see this demonstrated on matrix.org:
See 10/15, ~20:00 for the Python 3 migration. This is on some of the Synchrotrons on matrix.org.
See ~11/8 for the Python 3 migration. This is on the Synapse master on matrix.org.
We have also noticed some better CPU utilisation:
See 21:30 for the migration of federation reader 1, and 21:55 for the others. The federation reader is a particular pathological case, where the replacement of lists with iterators internally on Python 3 has given us some big boosts.
See 10/15, 4:00.The CPU utilisation has gone down on synchrotron 1 after the Python 3 migration, but not as dramatically as the federation reader. Synchrotron 3 was migrated a few days later.
As some extra data-points, my personal HS consumes about 300MB now at initial start, and grows to approximately 800MB — under Python 2 the growth would be near-immediate to roughly 1.4GB.
Where to from here?
Python 2 is still a supported platform for running Synapse for the time being. We plan on ending mainstream support on 1st April 2019, where upon Python 3.5+ will be the only officially supported platform. Additionally, we will give notice ahead of time once we are ready to remove Python 2.7 compatibility from the codebase (which will be no sooner than 1st April). Although slightly inconvenient, we hope that this gives our users and integrators adequate time to migrate, whilst giving us the flexibility to use modern Python features and make Synapse a better piece of software to help power the Matrix community.
How can I try it?
The port is compatible with existing homeservers and configurations, so if you install Synapse inside a Python 3 virtualenv, you can run it from there. Of course, this differs based on your installation method, operating system, and what version of Python 3 you wish to use. Full upgrade notes live here but if you’re having problems or want to discuss specific packagings of Synapse please come ask in #synapse:matrix.org.
Thanks
Many thanks go to fellow Synapse developers Erik and Rich for code review, as well as community contributors such as notafile and krombel for laying the foundations many months ago allowing this port to happen. Without them, this wouldn’t have happened.
Folks this is a big day for us at Matrix Towers, because today we release 0.34.0.
The big news for 0.34.0 is that we now recommend Python 3 for production use and have been running matrix.org under Python 3 for the past month.
Performance improvements have been marked, in some contexts we have seen 50% reductions in RAM and CPU usage. Here are some illustrative graphs to get you going but look out for a dedicated post delving into much more detail on the port. You can also see a Matrix Live interview with the project lead Amber (hawkowl) here.
Matrix.org federation reader workers, the big drops signify roll over to python 3
Synapse master on matrix.org, again the drop in RAM signifies the roll over to python 3
Many thanks to Amber for leading the effort, Rich and Erik for providing support as well as Notafile and Krombel from the community for pushing this effort right from the early days of the project.
If that wasn’t enough, 0.34.0 also all the usual bug fixes and perf improvements. In particular the media repository now no longer fails to decode UTF-8 filenames when downloading remote media and auto joining rooms now work on servers with consent requirements enabled.
In particular, if you want to run Synapse 0.34.0 on Python 3 take a look at the upgrade notes.
Synapse 0.34.0 changelog
Synapse 0.34.0 is the first release to fully support Python 3. Synapse will now run on Python versions 3.5 or 3.6 (as well as 2.7). Support for Python 3.7 remains experimental.
We recommend upgrading to Python 3, but make sure to read the upgrade notes when doing so.
Features
Add ‘sandbox’ to CSP for media reprository (#4284)
Recent Comments