> Finally, cryptographic warnings are being eliminated. Historically, as end-to-end encryption was rolled out throughout Matrix, not all apps verified the identity of their users, triggering confusing and unactionable warnings to users. We are now shifting towards only letting devices whose ownership has been verified by their owner participate in conversations, killing those warnings - as well as other underlying protocol changes to eliminate warnings.
As the operator of a small instance for family and friends, that's an important topic. The very frequent use case is : "I lost/replaced my phone and didn't save my passphrase". Does that mean that the account would be lost ?
First of all, we're shifting to generating a recovery key (like FileVault or similar) rather than forcing users to pick a recovery passphrase which they promptly get confused with their account password and/or lose.
Secondly, we're making it much less likely to actually need to ever enter a recovery key - with QR login meaning you just scan a QR code to launch your account, complete with all e2ee state (assuming you're already logged in somewhere; same as WA or Discord etc).
In the end, though, if you lose all your devices, you have no choice but have some kind of recovery key to get back in. We could use your account password, but (particularly in an OIDC world) it's then challenging to avoid exposing the account password to your server admin (thus breaking E2EE).
So instead, we're hoping that users will either save their recovery key, or worst case, if they do, they can reset it... but that will inevitably mean they won't be able to access their old messages from backup any more.
as always, the result of more security without taking into account real-life human behaviour, only leads to less security overall as people will just use services that don't have this behaviour and always allow getting back your account
As the operator of a small instance for family and friends, that's an important topic. The very frequent use case is : "I lost/replaced my phone and didn't save my passphrase". Does that mean that the account would be lost ?