[Standards] Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Reporting Account Affiliations
On Sun, 20 Aug 2023 at 09:35, Guus der Kinderen wrote: > I can't believe this was in August... > I've been toying with an Openfire-based implementation for the Reporting > Account Affiliations plugin. The plugin has not seen much real-world use yet > (it barely has been smoke tested). So far, I've only implemented the > 'reporting' functionality (the Info-request query mechanism, and the > embedding things). I have not yet implemented a consumer part (eg: using > account info to do something with regards to permissions). For the curious, > the code is here: https://github.com/igniterealtime/openfire-accountaff-plugin I'm trying to get my own implementation finally finished and published soon. > When implementing this, I wondered about the following. > > Is embedding worth it? > > A (considerable) benefit of embedding account info in stanzas is that it > saves round-trips: whenever an entity wants to know the data, it does not > necessarily need to perform a lookup. Are there other benefits that I've not > yet identified? Lookups are a pain. Your comment focuses on the time saved, but sending queries and waiting for a response generally consumes resources. The other party might take a long time to response, during which time we have to keep the stanza and associated state on hold. Now consider this multiplied 1000x during someone flooding a MUC room with automated bots, or whatever. I think there are significant benefits in stanzas bearing this information up-front if it is likely to be needed. In some cases I think I would rather fall back to the current behaviour than implement remote lookup. E.g. if I wanted to automatically grant voice to new MUC users with sufficient RAA credentials, I am more likely to just leave users who don't present RAA info without voice than to implement a lookup and complex async join logic. > The round-trip that's saved comes with a caveat: prior to usage, a recipient > MUST perform a disco/info query to the originating domain, to see if the > provided data can be trusted. This can be optimized (through caching), and > the disco/info result can be re-used for all accounts that originate from the > domain - but still, it's not quite round-trip free. As you say, I anticipate such lookups only being done infrequently. > Something about adding data to a stanza that is inherently 'unsafe' > (something that MUST be verified before use) does not sit well with me. It is > invitingly easy for an implementation to skip, or have an issue in that > second step, which would lead to misinterpretation of data that has potential > to be used for authorization purposes. I think it happens all the time that entities send stuff that cannot be trusted or needs additional verification. Data received from third parties should be untrusted by default, and that's just a general principle of most systems. > I expect that the account information data is rarely used - although I'll > readily admit that I've not coded this part yet, and that there might be > future use-cases that I'm not thinking of. Assuming that I'm right, then the > embedding of data on many stanzas can add considerable overhead: not only in > stanza size (which possibly gets persisted in MAM archives - which leads to > interesting questions around the validity of this data over time), but also > to compute the value at the originating server. The XEP addresses this by > providing guides on when to embed data (more on that below), but a > significant amount of overhead remains. Is that worth the savings of a > round-trip (especially when a verification request might be needed anyway)? I think there are only a very small number of stanza types where this needs to be added, so I'm not too worried about overhead. > The XEP defines three types of stanzas in which to embed account info. I've > found implementing this to be a lot harder than anticipated (which very well > might be a result of Openfire's API). One thing that I struggled with was to > choose when to act on a stanza that was being processed: when processing > inbound, client-originating stanzas, I worry about missing stanzas that are > generated by the server on the user's behalf. When applying this to outbound > stanzas, it's not straight-forward to identify stanzas that originated from > local users - and even if you do, something like MUC can have modified the > addressing, making identifying the correct local account even harder. The > complexity adds up, which leads to implementations that are more error-prone. You're not alone, it's not "hard", but it's not trivial in Prosody either. I'm still working on it. > If I understand the XEP correctly, it specifies that a server must remove > account info from client-originating stanzas if the server has support for > embedding account info for that particular type of stanza (to avoid > spoofing). Given the complexity that I tried to describe above, I believe > that this is
[Standards] Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Reporting Account Affiliations
On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 04:12:22PM +0200, Daniel Gultsch wrote: Hi Kev, council has accepted this XEP. cheers Daniel On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 3:56 PM wrote: The XMPP Extensions Editor has received a proposal for a new XEP. Title: Reporting Account Affiliations Abstract: This specification documents a way for an XMPP server to report to other entities the relationship it has with a user on its domain. URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/xep-reporting-account- affiliations.html The Council will decide in the next two weeks whether to accept this proposal as an official XEP. Bringing Up Matthews ProtoXEP Incidents over the holidays reminded me of this one. -- This friendly reminder brought to you by Zash ___ Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-le...@xmpp.org
[Standards] Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Reporting Account Affiliations
Hi all, I've been toying with an Openfire-based implementation for the Reporting Account Affiliations plugin. The plugin has not seen much real-world use yet (it barely has been smoke tested). So far, I've only implemented the 'reporting' functionality (the Info-request query mechanism, and the embedding things). I have not yet implemented a consumer part (eg: using account info to do something with regards to permissions). For the curious, the code is here: https://github.com/igniterealtime/openfire-accountaff-plugin When implementing this, I wondered about the following. Is embedding worth it? A (considerable) benefit of embedding account info in stanzas is that it saves round-trips: whenever an entity wants to know the data, it does not necessarily need to perform a lookup. Are there other benefits that I've not yet identified? The round-trip that's saved comes with a caveat: prior to usage, a recipient MUST perform a disco/info query to the originating domain, to see if the provided data can be trusted. This can be optimized (through caching), and the disco/info result can be re-used for all accounts that originate from the domain - but still, it's not quite round-trip free. Something about adding data to a stanza that is inherently 'unsafe' (something that MUST be verified before use) does not sit well with me. It is invitingly easy for an implementation to skip, or have an issue in that second step, which would lead to misinterpretation of data that has potential to be used for authorization purposes. I expect that the account information data is rarely used - although I'll readily admit that I've not coded this part yet, and that there might be future use-cases that I'm not thinking of. Assuming that I'm right, then the embedding of data on many stanzas can add considerable overhead: not only in stanza size (which possibly gets persisted in MAM archives - which leads to interesting questions around the validity of this data over time), but also to compute the value at the originating server. The XEP addresses this by providing guides on when to embed data (more on that below), but a significant amount of overhead remains. Is that worth the savings of a round-trip (especially when a verification request might be needed anyway)? The XEP defines three types of stanzas in which to embed account info. I've found implementing this to be a lot harder than anticipated (which very well might be a result of Openfire's API). One thing that I struggled with was to choose when to act on a stanza that was being processed: when processing inbound, client-originating stanzas, I worry about missing stanzas that are generated by the server on the user's behalf. When applying this to outbound stanzas, it's not straight-forward to identify stanzas that originated from local users - and even if you do, something like MUC can have modified the addressing, making identifying the correct local account even harder. The complexity adds up, which leads to implementations that are more error-prone. If I understand the XEP correctly, it specifies that a server must remove account info from client-originating stanzas if the server has support for embedding account info for that particular type of stanza (to avoid spoofing). Given the complexity that I tried to describe above, I believe that this is error-prone. Can we consider mandating that ALL account info from client-originating stanzas is to be removed, if the server has support for any kind of account reporting? Is there any reason to clean up this data in some, but not all client-originating data? Given all of the above, I'm cautiously arguing that all of the 'embedding' should be removed from the XEP. I do not believe that its benefit (preventing a query, sometimes) outweighs the drawbacks (in added complexity and overhead). Removing it might lead to implementations that are easier (faster) to build and are less error-prone. As a last remark: the explicit query for information is made against the bare JID of the entity for which information is seeked. XMPP dictates that a server MUST answer such IQ queries on behalf of the user, so this works. I do not like how this implies that another entity is being asked to provide data than the entity that we require to provide the data: the XEP explicitly does not want a client/user to provide this data (that's even defined as 'spoofing'). It wants a server to provide this data. In this light, it would be clearer to address the request to the server JID (without a node-part) instead of an account JID. I'm running out of coffee, so I'll leave it at this for now. I hope this will be helpful. Kind regards, Guus On Wed, Jul 19, 2023 at 4:12 PM Daniel Gultsch wrote: > Hi Kev, > > council has accepted this XEP. > > cheers > Daniel > > On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 3:56 PM wrote: > > > > The XMPP Extensions Editor has received a proposal for a new XEP. > > > > Title: Reporting Account Affiliations > > Abstract: > > This
[Standards] Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Reporting Account Affiliations
Hi Kev, council has accepted this XEP. cheers Daniel On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 3:56 PM wrote: > > The XMPP Extensions Editor has received a proposal for a new XEP. > > Title: Reporting Account Affiliations > Abstract: > This specification documents a way for an XMPP server to report to > other entities the relationship it has with a user on its domain. > > URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/xep-reporting-account- > affiliations.html > > The Council will decide in the next two weeks whether to accept this > proposal as an official XEP. > ___ > Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org > Info: Unsubscribe: %(real_name)s-unsubscribe@%(host_name)s > ___ ___ Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org Info: Unsubscribe: %(real_name)s-unsubscribe@%(host_name)s ___
