edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and so let users verify their own sessions at login.
Recent update is a huge leap forward, but still, no one understands, why they have to save/remember 3 passwords.
Only my closest family would listen me explaining that there's encryption but there's also authentication, yet only because I force that info upon them while standing over their shoulder, making sure they write down all the recovery keys.
Select few graduated to password managers and know to back the bases up.
It's a struggle, mainly because I'm the only one who cares in this particular social circle, and thus people don't see my concerns as normal.
There aren't three passwords; there are two: an account password and a recovery passphrase/key. It's the same as (say) macOS - where you have a login password to get into your computer, and a recovery key for FileVault in case of disasters.
However, the feedback is overwhelmingly that we need to iterate on the recovery passphrase - either making it a generated key (like macOS does), or going the whole hog and replacing the login password entirely with the cryptographic recovery one.
That is what's actually happening behind the scenes (though note that the "recovery key" is actually incredibly important since it gives you access to your key backups -- which is something you absolutely want to enable if you're an ordinary user). The problem is that by default Matrix tries to back the "recovery key" up to the homeserver you're using, encrypted with a second passphrase -- hence why you get two passphrases. You can opt-out of it, but I think the UX is the wrong way around -- it should be an opt-in thing and that would make it clearer that the recovery key is what's important and that the passphrase is only needed if you want to upload it to your homeserver.
Can I bump two phones together to exchange keys (using NFC or similar)? That would be the killer feature for us when we do conferences - perhaps more relevant to the Before Covid times of course.
I have logged in in the past couple of weeks. While setting up the encryption keys, the UI just hung there for a minute or two with almost no indication what was happening or how far things had progressed. I patiently waited through the process, but am not sure a casual user would know to wait for so long.
You must have hit us in the traffic spike on the matrix.org homeserver after we enabled e2ee by default - sorry. Keeping the matrix.org server scaling with the amount of traffic is a pain in the ass currently, but we're about to land horizontal scaling (at last) in the coming weeks which means others won't have to hang around. Thanks for being patient with it though. On the plus side, setup should be much lighter/faster for new users than existing ones.
Wait... Naive question: shouldn't you, especially in this case, still nag the account owner about his own unverified sessions? What if a bad-actor homeserver slides in a new session to snoop around?
BTW: I absolutely love the cross-signing move and riot/matrix in general! :) Thanks for your great work on this!
We do nag, in that all the green shields will suddenly go bright red. But we don't block the user from being able to send messages until they've resolved the problem.
It's possible we'll reintroduce this once cross-signing has been fully adopted though; it's tricky because we need to distinguish between encrypted rooms where you simply don't care if random users have unverified slides... versus ones where it's a disaster if an unverified session slides in. Finding the right UX for that is tough, but we think the current balance is an improvement.
That is really a tough UX problem... Maybe a room could have a "sensitive content" flag that is enabled by default for one-on-one chats and can be manually enabled for group chats.
AFAIK as more and more chats become encrypted (as it is the default for private rooms) then a rogue server operator wont to be able to snoop because they can't decrypt the messages unless you go through the verification process. And this aside, there are are few unobtrusive, but noticeable icons letting you know that you have an unverified session.
This hasn't helped. There's no way I could recommend Riot to anybody but my most techy friends. As soon as we get the message to "Re-request encryption keys from your other devices" they would be done with it. This is still a problem within the last 2 weeks.
well, if you’re seeing undecryptable messages at this point then it’s a bug. please submit bug reports from both sender and receiver so we can jump on it; we are triaging and chasing down each & all to avoid precisely this.
I mean, Matrix is great. I love it. But I would not be able to push Riot to my non-telecom-geek friends - the GUI is just so far from the experience you are used to with Whatsapp or Telegram. Messages that aren't deciphered? Scroll resetting mid-way? Click on reply and the GUI is stuck?
edit: To be clear, we no longer nag whenever there's an unverified login present - and unverified logins should increasingly be a thing of the past anyway given we now have cross-signing and so let users verify their own sessions at login.