XSF Discussion - 2021-02-11

emus, check https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Kevin_Smith_Application_2020

Yeah, just get the Board member to mail me at my isode account please.

I thought all of Board knew how to contact me by now, sorry.

Thanks, yeah I just checked your page

goffi: when you're around, I'd love to talk about xep-0355

arc: hi, I'm here

When you drafted this, did you consider using xpath instead of namespace plus attributes?

One thing that you have written here that I had not considered is client defined services. It is an interesting idea, though I am curious how you envision this being implemented in the real world

initially there was only namespace, the attribute has been added because it was the only to distinguish MAM for chat from MAM for Pubsub. XPath would probably complicate (and servers would need to have a handy xpath implementation available).

Note that I would love to have xpath or at least simplified xpath in XMPP

XPath is certainly more complicated. But is also more versatile. One of the problems with XPath is modern implementations are rare and hard to come by.

As a standards body we’re generally wary of xpath because of the burden it places on implementations.

FWIW XPath is also being discussed as a solution for improving push notifications currently

Maybe 2021 is the year to embrace XPath :)

Is "simplified xpath" a thing?

XMPPath

I've written this years ago, so I need to refresh a bit my memory ^^. But the idea was basically that you if you want e.g. advanced PEP and your server doesn't offer that, you could have a third party implementation and ask yourself your server to redirect stanza there, without having to wait for admin or anything.

MattJ: Ah, interesting. Where’s the push notification discussion happening? I missed that if it was on list.

Zash: I don't know if it's already a thing, but just keeping the base of path and attribute matching, without all the methods could be useful and easy to implement.

I’m coming to the conclusion that we need two distinct models for push notifications - one for e2e and one for non-e2e.

And trying to address both with the same mechanism is likely to be painful.

goffi, so just a path like `/{xmlns}name/...`?

Zash: for instance yes, maybe with attribute matching. I don't know if this would be enough for our needs though.

Nobody wants to work on lower level XML software. It's not sexy. It is easily overlooked as a resume filler. Nobody will pay for it. So that boils down to students or retired developers who love XML and take it on as a challenge.

Teensy bit of hyperbole there :)

No true Scotsman wants to work on XML! /s

Zash: :D

Kev: is it? I mean certainly there are /some/ people working on it.

Kev, there was noting on the list about push notifications and xpath, but it was just an idea to allow client select what it wants to have in the push notifications payload (assuming it is encrypted) https://github.com/tigase/tigase-xeps/issues/4

or just filter what is expected to send push notification and what is not

Including a stanza "skeleton" was suggested at some point as well, ie stripping all content and attributes, leaving only `<name xmlns="">` of each tag.

Uh, with my server dev hat on, plz no XSLT in the server

Zash, that was just an idea, something else allowing to get some data out of stanza and trigger push notifications would be good as well

I am certainly on board for discussing a limited XDM for use with a XMPP stream

I think the idea of stanza skeletons was that the skeleton gives the push server all required info for deciding whether to make a silent or a noisy push notification, without leaking any actual user data

So this is a different use case from "send encrypted message payload over push"

Not sure I follow

Right, giving the client everything it needs vs giving the push gateway everything it needs.

after online FOSDEM and Matrix usage I'm pretty sure that usage of Push & Fetch is a bad thing compared to pushing encrypted data (almost 30% of battery used by Element fetching data)

I think that giving control to the client would allow them to evolve quicker with less changes on the server side

Andrzej: I'm not sure if FCM and APNS will be okay with carrying all your encrypted payloads.

Why not? there is a limit of 4KB but it would work

That said, what you fundamentally want in that case is to initiate/terminate the xmpp client session on your app server and have a custom protocol that pushes over APNS to your client

because then you can optimize everything

As long as you have the xmpp client connection terminated on the mobile device, it will have to reconnect to the server and to resume the 0198 session rather often

every 30-120s on iOS and most likely will be killed anyway

Andrzej: only if you receive something that warrants an ack

that is why I prefer to have offline client and pushes with notifications on which user can act (ie. open app)

"Your chat program received an XML stanza. Open app to see if it was something you care about"

as for APNS and encrypted push, they've created even example for doing that https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/modifying_content_in_newly_delivered_notifications see Listing 1

Andrzej: well, I suppose you could use that to send an encrypted blob to the app

Ge0rG, I want usable "content" in the notification and with encryption and XPath that could work quite well ✏

I'm already doing that in Tigase & Siskin and AFAIR in Prosody

Andrzej: so what you want from XEP-0357 is to pass the full stanza to the app server?

no

Pass the parts you're interested in, encrypted, via the app server to the client?

to allow client send "XSLT" to tranform stanza in "encrypted payload" opaque to the app servers

this transformation and encryption is done on the XMPP server side

Andrzej: but the app server is under your control, so you can do arbitrary modifications there ✏

yes, but XMPP server is leaking user data to the app server in your example

Andrzej: that's a very significant effort for the xmpp server. What key should it use?

also that means the xmpp server needs to have significant knowledge over the used client / app-server infrastructure

client with transformation would upload key, in my case AES128 key

Why not an ec25519 key?

You don't really need the server to be able to decrypt the payload, right ;)

right, but it is aware of it anyway, so it can decrypt it

I am not sure if the trade-off of leaking the private data to the app server is a big thing.

I'm not sure which algorithm is faster, I've assumed AES128 is good in this case

Well, encryption isn't the bottleneck; XSLT is

XSLT seems like overkill.

As I've said, it does not have to be XSLT, but could be list of fields + XPath to fetch them ✏

> Uh, with my server dev hat on, plz no XSLT in the server M-Link has xslt to multiple reasons :| > just an idea to allow client select what it wants to have in the push notifications That seems sane at first thought.

Andrzej: I tend to use XPath as a generic term for XDM myself so this is no way a criticism, I'm just wondering if you are talking about XPath proper

I'm not sure, I was thinking (as XSLT cannot be used) to create some XEP that would specify filteiring data and fetching them from existing XMPP schema in to some structure, basically transforming stanza into something else

to filter and fetch data I was thinking about using XPath, but I could be wrong

Andrzej: what about a whitelist of xml namespaces to retain in the <message> element? would that suffice?

something like https://hg.prosody.im/prosody-modules/file/64b7daa6c42c/mod_csi_battery_saver/mod_csi_battery_saver.lua#l105 but more formalized

as we have 4KB hard limit, I think that might be not enough to just filter elements

but if clients could decide what should be included that would be a step forward

Namespaces does seem like a plausible Good Enough, and is easy to implement.

4kb after base64, right?

yes, correct, after base64

so in effect just about 1kB

not 3KB?

`base64(encrypt(strip(<message/>)))`?

Depending on how much we trust the app server to not be /too/ evil, we could stuff some compression in there too

Zash, I think this could be too big and in some cases it is more valuable to lose some of the message <body/> but deliver notification correctly

How big are your messages?

Xmpp does not implement full XML. Never did. It is a subset. So I don't see a problem with creating a subset of XDM

So you end up encoding the limits of google and apple services into my server.

XPath and xquery both use XDM

right, 3kB, not just 1

Zash: with omemo, messages can get big quickly

I was just thinking that, with omemo, the server can't do anything like ship half the <body>

XDM seems to be xpath 2.0, which afair lacks implentations and is may be overkill

if server is aware of clients OMEMO device id it could filter out keys in the notification and notification could still work ✏

Referring back to my earlier statement about how nobody wants to work on XML stuff 😆

You can have all of XPath as long as it's only `/{xmlns}name/{otherns}foo@bar/` and nothing else.

Zash, and attribute matching!

Nope!

At this point we're really talking about XPath 3.0 or quite possibly XPath 4.0

Prosody doesn't have that, so it doesn't exist!

Given that everything in this community takes 10 years or more to come about

arc: who is "we"?

We in this room right now, I would hope

And this community as in XML community. Given that we are still stuck with XPath/xslt/etc in browsers now in 2021

I'd refer back to what Kev said

XSLT is perfectly fine stop hating on it 😋

arc, would exi work for transforming XML stanza into "payload" for the client?

maybe I should be thinking about EXI instead of XSLT

I am, of course, referring to https://logs.xmpp.org/xsf/2021-02-11?p=h#2021-02-11-521589a72d0ff42a

No. EXI is just an alternative representation of XML data. It does make XDM/XPath/Xquery/XSLT faster when written with it in mind. But all processing is generally faster with the EXI because string compare is just that much slower

I'm sure there is nothing wrong with executing attacker-provided XSLT on your XMPP server.

I never said processing XSLT provided by the user.

XSLT is a turing complete language. You can open a similar glaring security hole by running user provided python, or most languages for that matter.

(XEP-0060 has references to XSLT 😱️)

also (as it was mentioned that I would like to "encoding the limits of google and apple services into my server"), I think that transformation and encoding is OK and would not impose limits on your server and if client would pass "limit" of the payload which it can receive, then server would just respect request from the client

So, size constraint. How about an ordered-by-priority list of payloads you're interested in? Server strips anything not in that list, then if it's still too large, strips the lowest priority payloads until it's small enough?

Where "list of payloads" could be xpath or just namespaces or somesuch, details.

that "could" work

Andrzej: this is a simplistic but valid way of thinking about EXI; within the root of a XMPP stream you typically only find about 6-10 elements; obviously your IQ, MESSAGE, and PRESENCE elements (capitalized only for clarity), stream: namespace stuff, and possibly session management.

Text domain XML would have the xml parser run multiple passes over the data stream to find delimiters (space, brackets, quotes, etc), break the stream up into events, possibly create a minidom out of those events, and then pass qnames (namespaces, prefixes, element names, attribute names, etc) to the application typically as string pointers into the stream buffer. But increasingly for memory safety, memcpy all those strings into new buffers too.

And then no matter how the client or server handles stanza routing, it either ends up testing the qnames against a large list of qnames it's designed to pass to various functions, or it hashes the qnames and checks for a value on a hashmap. In every case there's thousands of machine instructions for every stanza.

Going back to those, lets say always 15 or less possible elements found in a <stream:stream> root, EXI represents that as a binary number which typically is either bitpacked with only four bits used, or structured for later compression. In every case, you don't get "message", you just get the binary number 1. Which is much much simpler to parse.

Ignoring the stuff you can read up on if you ever wanted to implement it, that is EXI in a nutshell. And that is why it is not just 25x or more faster than text XML processing, it also takes far less memory and can be much more easily squeezed onto a microcontroller.

ok, I get it now, thanks

Has anyone tried doing EXI for S2S?

Yes.

Hmm. Going from https://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/#Efficient_XML I find only one (commercial) EXI implementation for C/C++ that doesn’t claim to be alpha quality.

Someone did mention a lack of libraries earlier.

Indeed.

Transforming stanzas between exi grammars is not difficult provided your grammar mapping is set up correctly

arc: Was that responding to my lack of library comment? Because if so I don’t see how it relates :) ✏

Using it for s2s, you're typically going to be routing stanzas between grammars. So in the above example, a xmpp client might say a message=1, but you may route that stanza to a server using a grammar that says message=0

Ah, my previous question, gottit, thanks.

With text domain xmpp you often don't have to modify the stanza. And when you do, only in small specific ways like changing the from= attribute. But with EXI S2S is also grammar conversion.

But going back to the xpath discussion, XDM 3.0 was certainly designed with EXI in mind though it is not referenced directly. EXI does not solve any problems in this area, it only makes things faster and with less bandwidth.

After a few minutes of looking, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no implementation for C/C++ that doesn’t claim to be alpha/seem abandoned other than one commercial Windows-only one. And, as you asserted earlier, I don’t want to be working on an EXI parser :)

There are more, and yes they are commercial. Thankfully no one has released a free one that is ready to use or I would start having trouble paying my rent.

Anyways all that is simply different problem. It doesn't help with identifying stanzas for routing to external software, whether you want to call that microservices or not.

Re EXI I think we could have significant benefits on mobile / low bandwidth, if a client implementation creates a grammar of everything supported by the client, uploads it to the server in some secure way, and the server only ever uses elements within that grammar to the client, stripping everything unknown and dropping empty elements.

Your client doesn't support CSNs? It's omitted from the grammar, server strips out the element from messages, empty messages get dropped on the server, battery wins

except only proprietary implementations, so no chance there

jonas’: implementations of EXI?

How hard can it be?

how hard can a binary xml parser be?

I mean, you just take an XML parser and you change some strings to numbers, right? Job done ;)

That sounds fun, we could call it FunXMPP

Funkkit? ✏

it's not-fun, so let's call it NunXMPP. Will also make clear that it's neither fun nor sexxy.

f

f

ignore me

"push 'f' to pay respects"?

You do not need to even parse. All you really need is some basic data structures. EXI is extremely easy to implement a reader and writer for.

The difficult part is generating grammar based on schema, then generating code based on grammar. And you'll see that for most cases, this is the part that is not provided

I have seen some foss implementations that work fine, but require that you provide a grammar file. Or provide all the low level data structures and the header, but leave the application api to build your own EXI decoder/encoder.

what are the upsides? just that it's ever-so-slightly smaller?

moparisthebest, savings by EXI are more than just "ever so slightly". especially when base64’d stuff comes into play. my understanding is that you could transfer that in decoded form in EXI

which saves what, 33% only in the case of base64'd stuff?

that’s considerable on GPRS

and remember that all of OMEMO is base64’d

GPRS is dead though so who cares

you wish

actually I wish it wasn't, but that's beside the point :)

in the USA 2G has been gone awhile, most carriers dropped 3G last month, the rest will next year

is all EXI offers "better compression" then ? and if so, how does it compare to "just compressing" XML, and does it suffer from the same security vulnerabilities "just compressing" XML does ?

moparisthebest: that doesn't mean 2G is dead, that means the major carriers dropped it and if you were in an area where it no longer exists you just don't have internet anymore unless you switch to a smaller local provider or use a slow wireless uplink. That's *more* of a reason to save bandwidth, not less.

I make no comment on EXI in particular, just complaining because I'm always annoyed when I've lived somewhere where it's impossible to get fast internet and people say "what's the problem, everywhere has fast broadband now!"

I think we might have discussed this before, and I think the conclusion was EXI is probably as vulnerable to CRIME/BREACH as gzip is ?

SamWhited, yea I think it sucks, but it doesn't change the fact that in the USA (and soon everywhere else presumably), it's dead

I think next year for canada iirc

I don't thik that's true though, it's just dead if you use AT&T or T-Mobile, otherwise I believe smaller providers are still using it because it's what they can afford to do easily. Even if it is dead, that doesn't mean "we don't need to worry about a 33% bandwidth savings" because it being dead doesn't mean everyone gets upgraded to 4G

right, I'm not saying EXI is good or bad, I'm asking what advantages it offers, how it compares to just running normal compression on XML etc

Maybe I misunderstood "which saves what, 33% only in the case of base64'd stuff? / GPRS is dead though so who cares"

I vaguely recall all of Sweden having some kind of GSM coverage at some point, but since recent-G networks, not so much. Not much profits in covering the Scandinavian mountain range in high-speed internet.

That sounds like "we don't have to save bandwidth, everyone has fast internet now"

AIUI you get rid of the parser and shuffle packed structs over the wire, instead of a text format that requires a proper parser.

that sounds like a proper security nightmare to me

How's HTTP/2 doing? How's all the ... binary Google format I don't remember the name of anymore.

so for sure EXI has downsides compared to compressed XML, like comparatively few libraries, no/much less security auditing, and such, does it have upsides?

Compression of the zlib variety has memory usage issues and security .. ickyness.

Zash, HPACK ? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7541 https://blog.cloudflare.com/hpack-the-silent-killer-feature-of-http-2/

EXI supposedly doesn't have that

how sure is anyone EXI doesn't have the same security problems ?

I'm sure it's just as good as ASN.1 & co! 😛

moparisthebest, protocol buffers, was the thing I forgot the name of. I mentally included HPACK in "HTTP/2"

I don't remember much about EXI, but it negotiates the cmopression up front instead of constructing a dictionary that is reused across stanzas right? In that case I don't see how it could be possible for it to have the same issues as stream compression or TLS compression

even HPACK acknowledges it's vulnerable to CRIME and friends https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7541#section-7.1.1

Can't you ... not do that with EXI?

Just do the binary packing stuff

CRIME & co comes from compressing user/attacker data in the same context as other stuff, so if you just don't do that, things should be better

SamWhited, I realize current-xmpp-compression doesn't do this, but nothing stops you from designing a XEP such that each stanza is compressed separately right?

moparisthebest: Correct, just need to write it down somewhere and get implementations to comply.

moparisthebest: sure, I've worked plces that implemented it that way in the pas

t

so, that's *not* vulnerable to CRIME then ?

then the questions are: 1. is EXI vulnerable to CRIME ? 2. if not, how does it compare size-savings-wise to just doing the above with XML ?

I did some measurements on the impact of compressing stanzas individually some time ago, and it was "still worth it"

Right. Assuming you're not doing something weird with your stanzas where you're mixing secret data and non-secret data, but in the general sense that's right

I’m not sure if EXI contains any compression at all

moparisthebest, doing a full flush between each stanza? yes, that fixes CRIME (if I remember correctly what CRIME was about)

or if you have to use it

in theory it should get rid of basically all base64 overhead right?

IIRC you only need to do a full flush when the sender changes.

Might be interesting things you could do with CSI integration

We just did a full flush on stanza boundaries at HipChat. Probably could have saved more by being clever, but it was easy and it helped a lot. Dropped our network traffic by a factor of 0.58 and dropped CPU utilization by a factor of 0.60

(with ZLIB)

A big part of why we dropped compression completely from Prosody was memory usage tho.

might even be better options today, it'd be interesting to see XMPP-wise how zstd and brotli compared

Yah, I didn't write down or publish our memory usage, but I assume it went up a bit. Don't remember it though, had to go look up those two numbers. It's been a while.

I'd be interested in fixed-dictionary compression

iirc that's what EXI is doing ^ ?

except it negotiates the dictionary, roughly

That’s more or less what EXI is isn’t it?

Heh, beaten :)

I though it was more like bit packing structs, not like zlib & co

but that implies doing the same compression across all stanzas in a stream, which probably implies CRIME

Not if you don't allow backreferences into user data, only into the dictionary

or possibly some other attack if you know the dictionary used, idk

isn't "xml element names used in the stanza" sometimes "user data" ?

You don't learn anything about the previous stanza sent by someone else

If you say "hello", then an attacker saying "hello" right after would be smaller because it can reference that previous "hello"

But if you build a static dictionary, that everyone involved already know, you don't leak user data from that.

Static dictionary would be something full of angle brackets and protocol stuff, no user data.

I don't know, maybe? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7541#section-7.1.2

I've thoguht about doing that with zstd a couple of times. It has a training mode where you can give it a sample set and it builds a dictionary from that you can reuse later. Never actually tried to see how well it does with a big set of XML though.

moparisthebest: is more than a little compression. With xmpp it can transform the overhead of a <message> stanza from around 100-200 bytes (depending on jid length) to around 10.

arc, so is it vulnerable to CRIME, and how does that compare to simply compressing XML stanzas

Where did you get that idea?

that was a question, not a statement :) "is it"

I don't believe so, no. Because it is not compression. It would use the same number of bits regardless of the length of the qnames, jids, etc.

EXI is a binary representation of XML. One of the functions is designed for is to then run it through a conventional compression such as DEFLATE

Another option is to bitpack.

is *that* vulnerable to CRIME

https://www.w3.org/TR/exi-primer/ goes into the higher level nitty gritty if you want to read more.

No because it is constant width.

The most you could probably learn from CRIME is encoding type. EXI supports four modes; byte packed, bit packed, precompressed, or compressed.

And the letter two are basically the same except the compression is deflate added on top of precompressed

https://www.w3.org/TR/exi-primer/#compression explains how data in the stream is rearranged for better compression

so how does it do on a super simple message stanza like https://paste.rs/Oe6.xml ?

$ wc -c * 175 msg.xml 101 msg.xml.brot 146 msg.xml.gz 130 msg.xml.zst

That will depend a lot on the mode

And the schema, presumably.

brotli does surprisingly well here (no settings touched, just `brotli -c msg.xml > msg.xml.brot`)

But you can basically ignore everything inside the XML brackets

not the attribute values?

Everything inside the XML brackets

so, run some common examples maybe?

There is an example in the primer

of what, say a normal chat client might use for a mode/grammar/whatever

https://www.w3.org/TR/exi/#stringTable will take care of the jids

<message becomes one byte (except in bit packed), SE-MESSAGE

> The life cycle of a string table spans the processing of a single EXI stream.

so that likely makes it vulnerable to CRIME then ?

in fact, it certainly would right?

if you put JIDs in there anyhow

from= and to= are each AT, so one byte each since they are optional. The values come from the string value table

except they aren't because you can't do that and avoid CRIME

so add them back in

What is your obsession with CRIME? The string tables are a constant value. They are not susceptible

because you can't just go "maybe it's not vulnerable to breaking the stream encryption ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

it either is, or it is not

The only thing you're going to get for information leak from the string table is the number of values in the table.

attackers can manipulate the JIDs that go across the stream right ?

How?

how would any JID except the sending one be in the dictionary up front anyhow ?

how will you know randomjid@randomdomain is going to message you?

maybe EXI is only useful in closed deployments where you know the entire network up front ?

(and, maybe, don't care about TLS providing CRIME-proof security, still unknown on this one)

You're right the length of jid could be leaked.

so if you cut that stanza down to essentially the bare minimum info that must be transmitted in it, and it's probably *too* cut down actually, you end up with something like https://paste.rs/aPt which is 86 bytes

that means EXI would have to fall somewhere between 86 and brotli's 101 to be useful at all

that's a small range for improvement

i think that's a very simplistic example

look at an omemo pre key bundle for example

or generally anything with lots of nasted elements

sure, I suspect brotli would improve even more with anything base64'd though

plus 184 requests 333 requests

and all the other stuff we regulary put into messages

and it should be easier on the cpu

honestly regular compression's ratio should get better the bigger the stanza is right? so a small one like this is probably least fair

i have a deployment where we would like to use compression but can’t because it's too expensive

and if implemented correctly exi can even be faster than string parsing

where as compression is always slower

You can add brotli on top of EXI. It works very well for that purpose.

I doubt that's always true (that compression is slower)

Daniel: are you sure about that? We had CPU usage drop on one machine because there were less TLS packets where most of the CPU was being taken up

But again this is all based on the grammar.

SamWhited, no

Worth measuring anyways if you haven't. If you're using a slow TLS cipher and a fast compression algorithm you might make some gains

I understand EXI should be able to be better than general compression in a closed system where you know every stanza that will ever be passed

the question is, can EXI be better than general compression for a chat client in the public federated XMPP network

any compression system that works by reusing user input has issues the like of CRIME and similar. EXI could be fine if no string lookup table was used. However schema-based EXI is complicated and schema-less EXI is far from optimal ✏

I suspect the question is actually "assuming that EXI and GZIP flushing on stanza boundaries are both 'good enough', which one is easier to implement and deploy widely" (and the answer is probably normal stream compression), but of course I may be wrong.

yes roughly SamWhited , I think it's rather obvious general compression and regular XML is easier no ?

somthing like exi would still be more efficient than gzip. also why would you think flushing on stanza boundaries is enough?

so it becomes 1. is EXI secure 2. is it better than that, and if so, better enough to justify the effort?

Could do something in the direction of HPACK and/or WhatsApps FunXMPP compression scheme...

moparisthebest: I suspect so, yes

moparisthebest: again, EXI is not compression. It is a schema-aware binary representation of XML data. It is intended that you use compression on top of it.

When you're not using compression on top of it, typically you use bit packed mode.

then you'd have to show EXI+compression is better in terms of size+effort vs XML+compression ?

and additionally, ensure EXI doesn't introduce security bugs like CRIME

larma> somthing like exi would still be more efficient than gzip. also why would you think flushing on stanza boundaries is enough? honest question: why would you think that it is not enough?

Actually as I'm thinking about it, it would make a lot of sense to pre-populate the values string table with the JIDs in your roster. And if you are worried about CRIME, you can also specify that padding is used to make all jids transfer as a fixed width

flow, attackers can control certain content of stanzas even if it's not them sending

so then you can use than as an oracle to determine a user's roster

How?

larma, unfortunately I am appearantly missing pieces why this is relevant

ah maybe there is something that I have in mind that nobody else has. If we ever do some kind of efficient compression on stanzas, I'd want to also make use of it inside SCE. Then it's no longer transport encryption only, but also about end-to-end-encryption relevant. And if you assume the server as an attacker, they can easily modify IDs and similar to modify certain parts of your encrypted message to exfiltrate others. ✏

larma, thanks, I probably need to think about this a little more (and with more sleep)

I still think that doesn't seem worth considering, the server has to be trusted, that's the whole model that we have. Trying to change that and doing complicated partial stanza encryption just seems like a waste of time. Let's just settle on compression that's "good enough" and in the occasional system where there's some high-security environment where the server isn't trusted, don't use it.

Did anyone define "good enough"?

larma, but it sounds like you are talking about an intermediate hop modifyin encrypted bytes, that shouldn't be possible, no?

Zash: "better than no compression?"

I have to agree with Sam

Here's the thing; XMPP is low enough bandwidth and no one really cares except IoT, and maybe mobile.

(Different topic: Kev - there was a misunderstanding with Sam W., nevermind about the Twitter thing - I will just request the pinning via mail 😊️ )

flow, no, certain parts are unencrypted, like message id. Also you very likely would want to be able to reply to unencrypted messages with encrypted messages without risking to actually leak the content of the encrypted message 😉

Yah, sorry, I didn't realize Twitter required me to have a separate personal account

I'm still happy to help on the comms team as necessary though, someone just tell me what needs doing and I'll see what I can do.

larma, ahh I think I got it now: values that are to-be encrypted are determined by the server

On IoT these days we mostly care about making xml easy enough to use that we can fit it on a microcontroller and utilize less cpu and transmit size so that the battery lasts longer

that is certainly interesting. I never considered compressing the encrypted bytes prior base64 encoding them and the implications of doing so

SamWhited if you read in the CommTeam MUC occasional or subscribe to the PR that should be fine. If you want, I can point you as reviewer there, too

EXI seems extremely complicated, but CPUs can process it with a minimum amount of code. A typical EXI compiled binary static library is around 8k.

FWIW, I believe EXI would also be able to avoid base64 for raw bytes (at least, that is what I remember being told ~5 years ago)

emus: can you invite me? I don't see the comms team muc listed on the website

https://xmpp.org/newsletter.html here is a link if thats okay for you, I dont have you in my contact list so I guess thats quicker

thanks

And when you're dealing with a microcontroller costing under $1, that only has like 16k-64k flash for all the software, the size of the software matters a lot. And when the manufacturer is budgeting the mAh battery, they care a lot about keeping the microcontroller in sleep and moreso keeping the transmitter powered down as much as possible when the cpu is awake.

Because in the end, they don't care about anything else. They don't care about standards compliance. They don't care what technical solution is used. They don't care about CRIME or data security.

They're making 10 million of these units, at minimum, so if they can save 10 cents that's a million dollar profit.

They look at a big stack of money on one side, and a technician whining about standards compliance or user security on the other, they will choose the big stack of money every time.

The only reason *some* of these manufacturers are using xml at all, and a very small number overall, is because exi can do the work with less code, less cpu, and less transmit power than message queues, which is what they would be using otherwise

right, I get why EXI is a win for bottom-of-the-barrel iot, still not sure if it's a win or not for generic federated xmpp chat client though

Nobody is using it for general federated xmpp

yes but I'm wondering if it's worth pursing it for that though

moparisthebest, ~1MB chunks of XML sent to my phone something something would be nice if it was smaller

but maybe regular compression solves it for you, and that's easy

Half the time they just want http anyway. Because the software is free and HTTP is lightweight. And because their in-house developers already know it.

but then most of that consists of people sending presence to all the same MUCs that I'm in

Zash, I agree with you. And it would likely turn the 1MB chunk into 1kb.

String tables are surprisingly efficient at jids

FWIW this is with CSI buffering up unimportant stuff into larger chunks, that's how it gets so large.

arc, but "string tables" can't be used on public federated XMPP because they are vulnerable to CRIME, so they are out

I would say that you choose not to use it because you believe is impossible to implement with your security criteria in mind

the real question is, is CRIME really that bad?

And if I really cared I would have worked on it a long time ago

yah, honestly, after SASL is complete I'm not sure how much I care about CRIME-like vulnerabilities.

IIRC you almost need to launch a DoS attack to get anything out of it, maybe just sprinkling some rate limits on top makes it all Good Enough

I am certain that there is an orchard full of hanging fruit for xmpp security, nobody will go through the effort

CRIME also gets less and less relevant with e2ee

(post-SASL that is)

And good luck doing CRIME with SCRAM anyways

I mean, all the software that uses libxml2 should just be considered insecure by that very nature

makes me pretty nervous to pretend CRIME isn't a threat... attacks only get better, never worse

Google was so certain of the fundamental insecurity of anything XML that they never even implemented encrypted S2S

Huh. Source?

and actually I keep saying CRIME when BREACH is actually a better fit for what we are talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREACH

Zash, source is the number of times I've had beer with Google developers

moparisthebest, C-ompression something something is easy to remember tho

In 2019 I had a drink with a few of the guys that previously worked on the gtalk/hangouts sre team, and I commented that it probably was a lot easier doing seculity with Go and it's brand new xml library. One of them shot his drink out his nose

They apparently don't use XML internally anymore because of it

well, google is well known for their poor decisions so :)

imagine taking advice from a company that created and killed 83 chat systems in the last 15 years

But that's the thing, not once did they create one that actually works the way they wanted it to

And anything even remotely stable is just piled on mess over mess until they have to start over

They are spot on with that one though, XML is absolute garbage in terms of being able to do a secure implementation. Way to big of an attack surface for something that should just be a way to transfer a tree…

Not that Google's dev practices or product management practices are always great, but they know their security.

Protobuffs is wide open to attack too. They work around that with things like ucs4 and fixed length string entries

I'm not saying protobuf is perfect, I don't know much about them, just that they're not wrong about XML being bad.

XML is the worst except for everything else

No, it's just worse than most other things. We're stuck with it for the base of XMPP, and I don't see anything else that works in a similar enough way to do a streaming protocol in as nice of a manner, but that doesn't mean it's not insecure garbage or that we shouldn't be *very* careful with it

XML is not bad by design. Is bad because nobody cares.

I don't think that's true. Designs like hacking namespaces on and mixing them with attributes, adding things like proc insts, etc. are just bad.

I'm not saying that's not bad. I'm saying the XML suffers the same type of abandonment that led to heartbleed

I mean, I'm sure nobody caring is a problem too, but I'd also say XML is just bad by design and therefore we need to be *very* careful about its use and not dismiss other peoples concerns about it so redily.

I just get mad every time somebody does the "it's just <> vs {}, why is HN so trendy?" or whatever in this room when realistically whatever they're complaining about is probably a serious problem that we should be addressing instead of being dismissive.

but the "json is better than xml" people don't have any answers for all the ways in which json is worse

and you can s/json/anything/ there too

My langsec friend said something some time that I remember as "xml is okay, it's not made of length-prefixes and stuff"

Sure, but that's not the problem, the problem is that we pretend that means XML is good somehow and then Go has the issue where namespaces can be manipulated and it's like the third time I've seen that in an XML decoder and somehow we just say "no, XML is fine, let's use more of it" every damn time

The fundamental problem is that XML got so much stuff *right* that we’re stuck with the stuff it didn’t.

"bad libraries exist" is a thing

"Every library is consistently bad in the same ways" is the actual problem.

Oh I'm not dismissing anything. I'm just worn down by an industry that doesn't care until it nearly destroys them. I lead the Python xml-sig that produces code responsible for billion dollar industries. Those companies don't care. If the problem were made bluntly clear to them, they wouldn't fund anything. They would direct their technical teams to migrate to another language

binary formats never have parsing vulnerabilities https://duckduckgo.com/?q=asn.1+parsing+vulnerabilities

But I dunno, I just think XML is garbage in general outside of the security realm too and got next to nothing right. I accept it's the only thing we could use for a system like XMPP, but IMO we should literally never use more of it ever regardless of whether it's one of the parts that has consistent security issues or not

asn1, the xml before xml, let's go back to it!

If only for the CRITICAL bit

SamWhited, face it, everything we do is garbage held together with duct tape. That we haven't nuked/pandemic'd/burned ourselves into extinction yet is quite amazing. Probably because we invented duct tape 😀

you're not wrong

That and because we are hanging just above the low hanging fruit. Like vulnerabilities in cryptocurrency exchanges that allow people to steal millions of dollars in untraceable funds

At least it's our garbage. Our own! Our ... precious!

Sure people could attack xmpp. I imagine many of us could, knowing what we know. But there is no direct profit from doing so, and any scheme to profit from such an attack would be too complicated to pull off

I think this can be summarized as "computers are bad, formats don't matter" https://duckduckgo.com/?q=json+parsing+vulnerabilities https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xml+parsing+vulnerabilities

https://xkcd.com/2030/ comes to mind

That's exactly the problem, "our entire field is bad" doesn't mean "so we should give up and use whatever we want and ignore the problems with specific formats because another one might also have problems or there might be an issue at some other layer of the stack"

but, switching formats doesn't address the problem, you should just address the problem instead

"our entire field" has existed for like half a century and usually doesn't directly kill people ... unless you count artillery trajectory calculations ... oh no

I didn't say we should switch formats, I said XML is what we've got and it's probably the only thing that works for XMPP but we shouldn't be dismissive when people point out problems with it and we shouldn't add more of it.

SamWhited, and we shouldn't do what everyone else does and wrap it in JSON!

Oh wait, oh no, https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0295.html

I mean, yah, we should definitely not implement XEP-02395 :)

err, 0295

No Sam. We should fix it. Here I'll put it on my giant stack of things I care about that will never earn a cent, will not improve my chances of getting hired, would take the rest of all of our lifetimes, and leave us living on the street.

Although 295 was obviously a joke, I note that the first suggested encoding pretty much works, and actually avoids some of the security issues of XML ;)

The one that looks a bit like JSON-LD?

I do really care about these things. I'm not completely jaded. I think a lot of people really care about these things. I'm pointing out that we need to solve some lower-level fundamental problems first.

Zash? Does it? Yes, anyway. The one that isn’t entirely stupid.

When I wrote it I didn’t think of it in terms of having benefit over the XML representation, but it *does* eliminate whole classes of security issues.