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.