logoalt Hacker News

cypharyesterday at 2:27 AM1 replyview on HN

Unfortunately, they still use libolm[1] for e2ee which is deprecated[2] and has known security issues[3]. The maintainers appear to not be interested in switching to the newer Rust-based library. Matrix argue that the timing channel attacks are not possible over a network, but the history of timing channel attacks argues that this very few protocols are this fortunate (most people thought timing attacks against TLS were impossible too, until someone bothered to attack them).

[1]: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/1786 [2]: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/08/libolm-deprecation/ [3]: https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...


Replies

BrenBarnyesterday at 4:43 AM

Yeah, although Matrix is theoretically about being an open protocol supporting a range of clients and servers, in practice it winds up being heavily skewed to just Element/synapse. I think this is partly because there is still too much churn in the protocol. A decent amount of that churn is improving things, but it still makes it too hard for average-joe devs to keep up with what's hip. I don't think there's much chance of a real menu of feature-rich clients until the protocol becomes stable. Unfortunately, I don't foresee that happening soon.

show 1 reply