This posts is a list of all the suspicious things Matrix/New Vector and Element (which is run by Matrix employees) have done.
Crossposted to c/opensource from c/privacy.
I want to start a civil discussion on this topic, if anyone has improvement ideas for the list or wants to debate one of the bullet points for removal, I’m all ears.
Matrix
- Matrix was created inside of an Israeli Intelligence Corporation called Amdocs.
- Matrix leaks lots of metadata, in many cases not fixed to date. The homeserver can and does store lots of metadata.
- Even if you run your own instance, it still sends data to the main homeserver.
The Cloudflare Situation
All research on the Cloudflare situation is done by me.
If you check the SSL Certificate for https://element.io you’ll see it’s by Cloudflare.
Cloudflare has MANY privacy issues, and just wanting to centralize the web.
The Element client is the most used client, with many users using the default instance, because it’s easy or they want to simply join their friends or a community on Matrix easily. This comes as worrying because Cloudflare decrypts TLS traffic and this is even more worrying because Cloudflare is a honeypot.
Even if Cloudflare cannot decrypt anything because of the Matrix protocol encrypting them beforehand, lots of metadata in the message itself is send over plaintext like who you’re talking with, channel name etc. (and this is excluding the metadata leaks that Matrix has to the main homeserver and in general). Of course, this could be mitigated by using Element on another instance that isn’t behind Cloudflare, but the average user will not know to do that or even understand the concept of federation and decentralization.
Cloudflare’s CDN can be used without using their SSL certificate which just backdoors your site, so why is Element using it? Element is run by the same people that are behind matrix.org (mostly), so they know how to do basic privacy features.
Even if we assume there’s no ill intent here, Cloudflare just wants to centralize the web (~30% of SSL traffic goes through Cloudflare, ~80% of CDN traffic goes through Cloudflare), which is obviously against Matrix’s mission of decentralized communication.
Through Cloudflare, an adversary with ill intention could target a Matrix user and be susceptible to metadata collection.
The CIA & NSA admitted that they kill people by gathering and using metadata.
I’ve took this argument in the official Matrix channels, and no one has been able to properly respond to the arguments presented. Though, they were only members, no admins were involved.
If anyone wants to bring these issues forth to the official Matrix admins, I’d be more than glad to help. Thanks for reading!
You can “trust” it, because its self hostable, and buildable from source, unlike other not self hostable services. Its origins and funding are important, but less so because of those two attributes.
The metadata leaking is a problem with every federated system, xmpp included. You could even call the metadata leaking a feature, not a bug, since its what makes federation possible.
Whats important is that the metadata being leaked, isn’t linked to your identity, unlike with signal. Matrix doesn’t require phone numbers, or emails to sign up. You also can run an instance without turning on federation, if that’s still a concern.
The cloudflare concerns aren’t an issue as long as you run your own instance, or join one that doesn’t use cloudflare. There’s nothing requiring cloudflare built into the software or the protocol.
Yeah, but the vast majority of non-technical users don’t bother to change homeservers, or even clients, so it could affect them. What puzzles me is why the Matrix/Element team chose Cloudflare for app.element.io, (matrix.org uses LetsEncrypt), when CF aims to centralize the web and is a privacy nightmare. It’s more of an ethics thing, in my opinon. But sure, like I mentioned too, could be solved by switching homeservers/clients but the vast majority of users won’t bother.
I understand it even though I also hate cloudflare, as ddos attacks are extremely difficult to thwart otherwise. But of course it stands that nothing in the code of any of the homeservers, apps, or protocol requires cloudflare.
Also you listed signal below as something you prefer, and they use cloudflare (and required phone numbers), and since its not self hostable, that’s mandatory.
The problem is not mainly the leaking metadata, but that the Matrix protocol is designed to indefinitely store and freely share this metadata with every home-server joining (which even gets a full copy of everything retro-actively). XMPP does not do this.
How does xmpp not store information about federated users joining a room?
XMPP only does this on the single server the room resides on and does not share this info with other participating servers except for the bare minimum needed to show the users nick names.
I recommend you hosting your own Matrix home server and after joining a few federated rooms look at your database what kind of historical metadata ends up on your new server. It’s honestly appalling from a privacy point of view.
Yes this is needed for room persistence across multiple servers, but IMHO that is a solution looking for a problem and also a highly over-engineered one.
There’s ongoing work to encrypt much of the metadata. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3414
Without this solution the transition to p2p would be much more complicated, would it not?