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Pre-disclosure: upcoming critical security release of Matrix SDKs and clients

23.09.2022 14:53 — Security — Matrix Security Team

We will be releasing a security update to matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 and clients which implement end-to-end encryption with these libraries, to patch critical security issues, on Wed, Sept 28th. The releases will be published in the afternoon, followed by the disclosure blog post around 16:00 UTC. The affected clients include Element Web, Desktop, iOS and Android. We will also be working with downstream packagers and forks over the coming days to ensure a synchronised release to address affected clients.

Clients using matrix-rust-sdk, hydrogen-sdk and matrix-nio are not affected by these critical issues. We are also auditing third-party client SDKs and clients in advance of the release, and will work with the projects if action is needed. So far we've confirmed that other popular SDK/clients including mtxclient (nheko), Matrix Dart SDK (FluffyChat), Trixnity (Timmy), Syphon, mautrix-go (Gomuks) and mautrix-python are not affected by the issues in question.

If you maintain or package a (potentially) affected E2EE-capable Matrix client and need to coordinate on the release, please contact security@matrix.org.

We advise to upgrade as soon as possible after the patched versions are released.

Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.

Security release of matrix-appservice-irc 0.35.0 (High severity)

13.09.2022 16:56 — Releases, Security — Denis Kasak

We've released a new version of matrix.org's node-irc 1.3.0 and matrix-appservice-irc 0.35.0, to patch several security issues:

The details of the final vulnerability will be released at a later date, pending an audit of the codebase to ensure it's not affected by other similar vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities have been patched in node-irc version 1.3.0 and matrix-appservice-irc 0.35.0. You can get the release on Github.

The bridges running on the Libera Chat, OFTC and other networks bridged by the Matrix.org Foundation have been patched.

Please upgrade your IRC bridge as soon as possible.

The above vulnerabilities were reported by Val Lorentz. Thank you!

Security releases: matrix-js-sdk 19.4.0 and matrix-react-sdk 3.53.0

31.08.2022 18:13 — Releases, Security — Denis Kasak

Today we are issuing security releases of matrix-js-sdk and matrix-react-sdk to patch a couple of High severity vulnerabilities (reserved as CVE-2022-36059 for the matrix-js-sdk and CVE-2022-36060 for the matrix-react-sdk).

Affected clients include those which depend on the affected libraries, such as Element Web/Desktop and Cinny. Releases of the affected clients will follow shortly. We advise users of those clients to upgrade at their earliest convenience.

The vulnerabilities give an adversary who you share a room with the ability to carry out a denial-of-service attack against the affected clients, making it not show all of a user's rooms or spaces and/or causing minor temporary corruption.

The full vulnerability details will be disclosed at a later date, to give people time to upgrade and us to perform a more thorough audit of the codebase.

Note that while the vulnerability was to our knowledge never exploited maliciously, some unintentional public testing has left some people affected by the bug. We made a best effort to sanitize this to stop the breakage. If you are affected, you may still need to clear the cache and reload your Matrix client for it to take effect.

We thank Val Lorentz who discovered and reported the vulnerability over the weekend.