Comment by cyphar
7 years ago
Is there a specific issue other than "it's not the default" that precludes it from secure messaging? This is the thing I don't understand about your position -- you have been saying for a very long time that "it's not ready yet" but as far as I can see the default-to-unencrypted setup is the main issue you have with it? I get that asking a journalist to use it right now is a bad idea, but if E2EE was the default today what other issues do you see?
From my PoV, Matrix has many features that might actually end up increasing security over Signal's design. Just as an example, you cannot blacklist or even get alerted to new devices being added to an E2EE conversation with Signal (and if you look at things like the Assistance and Access legislation here in Australia, that is a serious concern). With Matrix you do detect it and can blacklist the other device (and with cross-signing being done very soon, you can also be sure that verification of devices will be a rare event). I also think the new emoji-based verification is a massive improvement over Signal's "safety numbers" setup.
I'd also be interested to hear Thomas clarify this. I saw a recent thread on Twitter where he and bascule were talking about it and it still wasn't super clear, but one specific point I recall is that Matrix has a significant amount of metadata stored on the server side which constructs a social graph. As opposed to something like Signal which has close to nothing stored on the server.
To me this seems like an issue of use case. If my goal is to be able to talk to my family and friends, and I don't care that it's known that I'm talking to them as long as the contents of the messages are private, that is fine for me. For a case with more stringent requirements, I can see Matrix not being a good recommendation in its current design.