Matrix has many incentives to lie or mislead. Their leadership includes the CEO of a company whose product is a Matrix client. There's active political talks about the EU investing heavily in Matrix. He's got a vested interest in looking good, even at the expense of doing or even being good.

On the other hand, I have nothing to gain. If everyone switches to Matrix tomorrow, nothing in my life changes. If Matrix self-implodes and everyone goes back to XMPP tomorrow, nothing in my lfie changes.

The only things I want are:

But what about "don't make perfect the enemy of good"?

If your cryptography isn't damn near-perfect, it's shit. There aren't many cryptographic solutions that get a C+ in the world. It's either an A, A-, or an F.

An F in cryptography is aes-js / pyaes, as this Trail of Bits blog by Opal Wright explains:

Mistakes in cryptography are not a sin, even if they can have a serious impact. They’re simply a fact of life. As somebody once said, “cryptography is nightmare magic math that cares what color pen you use.” We’re all going to get stuff wrong if we stick around long enough to do something interesting, and there’s no reason to deride somebody for making a mistake.

What matters—what separates carelessness from craftsmanship—is the response to a mistake. A careless developer will write off a mistake as no big deal or insist that it isn’t really a problem—yadda, yadda, yadda. A craftsman will respond by fixing what’s broken, examining their tools and processes, and doing what they can to prevent it from happening again.

Does this sound familiar?

Now, am I saying that they're lying or deliberately misleading?

No. I'm describing the incentives they're operating under!

This could be entirely subconscious or even unconscious decisionmaking and/or behavior for all I know.

But it's really suspicious to insist that the specific attack I keep describing is handwaved as "outside our threat model" when their public threat model is so frustratingly incomplete that it might as well just say Cryptography: Vibes.

I mean, look at it: https://spec.matrix.org/v1.17/appendices/#security-threat-model

You wanna see a fucking threat model?

Here: https://github.com/fedi-e2ee/public-key-directory-specification/blob/main/Specification.md#threat-model

And this is for an ActivityPub service that just stores data in immutable plaintext and serves it over HTTPS!

@soatok

I mean the thread model for fucking is pretty simple, it's literally just STDs

@sudo200
If you took sex threat modeling seriously though, there’d also be various forms of abuse, overwhelming the partners, various possible forms of physical and mental injuries, the mentioned risk of involuntary procreation, ... to consider and suddenly your back at having cryptography level threat modeling over sex again.

It’s not cryptographers overthinking this, it’s everyone underthinking it for sanity reasons. I mean visiting a BDSM workshop on “consent” is like a multi-hour threat modeling appreciation session.  
@soatok