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 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.
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!
signal is centralized, requires your phone number, hosted in the US, has very limited interface and features, and run by a steve jobs type personality. thanks, but no thanks.
Signal has done their fair share of shady things like not releasing the source code for a year to implement some cryptocurrency and the closed-source anti-spam program running on their servers, but that can be mitigated anyhow since Signal works without trusting the server. It’s far better than other alternatives, anyways.
This is a tricky question that can’t be answered on computers either even if you run Linux since the package manager can be compromised etc. In case of phones, best bet would be GrapheneOS with verified boot so there isn’t a chance it’d get infected.
Signal is the way to go, Matrix is like Odysee
Signal is more Odysee-like if anything, not federated and having crypto bs builtin.
signal is centralized, requires your phone number, hosted in the US, has very limited interface and features, and run by a steve jobs type personality. thanks, but no thanks.
Signal has done their fair share of shady things like not releasing the source code for a year to implement some cryptocurrency and the closed-source anti-spam program running on their servers, but that can be mitigated anyhow since Signal works without trusting the server. It’s far better than other alternatives, anyways.
And what do you with the operating system running beneath?
This is a tricky question that can’t be answered on computers either even if you run Linux since the package manager can be compromised etc. In case of phones, best bet would be GrapheneOS with verified boot so there isn’t a chance it’d get infected.