18 Jan
2025
18 Jan
'25
5:38 a.m.
On Sat, 18 Jan 2025 at 07:35, JC Brand <lists(a)opkode.com> wrote:
On 2024/12/24 12:52, Dave Cridland wrote:
4. Do you have any security concerns related to this specification?
Always! I think in this case the Security Considerations are quite light.
In particular, there is no discussion of how a message might be
deliberately retracted as a form of abuse - this is perhaps worst in cases
where the tombstone support is implemented.
What kind of abuse are you thinking of here, and what exactly do you think
needs to be written down?
You mean like someone trying to fill a chat history with useless
tombstones? This doesn't seem to me like a XEP-0424-specific concern. You
don't need retractions or tombstones to spam a chat with useless messages.
If an abusive message is retracted, and the service actually excises the
message entirely from the archive, replacing it with a tombstone, then
there's no record of the abusive message (but it's been seen by its target,
and so has done its job).
So, for example, I send a message saying something highly abusive such as
"JC Brand prefers XEP-0136 to XEP-0313" to xsf@ and then after you've seen
it and understandably been shocked to your very core, and then I retract
the message, it'd be sensible if the moderators could examine the archive,
find the message, and uphold your complaint - rather than my retraction
disposing of the evidence.
Does that make more sense? Am I misreading the intent of tombstones there
(and, therefore, could this be made clearer?)
Dave.