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Restricting room membership based on space membership

A desirable feature is to give room admins the power to restrict membership of their room based on the membership of one or more spaces from MSC1772: spaces, for example:

members of the #doglovers space can join this room without an invitation¹

Proposal

A new join_rule (restricted) will be used to reflect a cross between invite and public join rules. The content of the join rules would include the rooms to trust for membership. For example:

{
    "type": "m.room.join_rules",
    "state_key": "",
    "content": {
        "join_rule": "restricted",
        "allow": [
            {
                "space": "!mods:example.org",
                "via": ["example.org"]
            },
            {
                "space": "!users:example.org",
                "via": ["example.org"]
            }
        ]
    }
}

This means that a user must be a member of the !mods:example.org space or !users:example.org space in order to join without an invite². Membership in a single space is enough.

If the allow key is an empty list (or not a list at all), then no users are allowed to join without an invite. Each entry is expected to be an object with the following keys, or a string representing the MXID of the user exempted:

space: The room ID of the space to check the membership of.
via: A list of servers which may be used to peek for membership of the space.

Any entries in the list which do not match the expected format are ignored.

When a homeserver receives a /join request from a client or a /make_join / /send_join request from a server, the request should only be permitted if the user has a valid invite or is in one of the listed spaces. Note that the server may not know if the user is in a particular space, this is left to a future MSC to solve.

If the user is not part of the proper space, the homeserver should return an error response with HTTP status code of 403 and an errcode of M_FORBIDDEN.

Unlike the invite join rule, confirmation that the allow rules were properly checked cannot be enforced over federation by event authorization, so servers in the room are trusted not to allow invalid users to join.³ However, user IDs listed as strings can be properly checked over federation.

Discovery of restricted rooms

The discovery of rooms in a space, as discussed in MSC2946: spaces summary, must be updated to allow for discovery of restricted rooms.

MSC2946 defines that a room should be included in the spaces summary if it is accessible (world-readable or if the user is already in the room). MSC3173 declares that if a user can view the stripped state of a room if they are able to join the room. Combining these two MSCs, the spaces summary should include rooms with restricted join rule which a user is able to join (i.e. they're a member of one of the spaces declared in the join rule).

The server-server API discussed in MSC2946 does not know the user who is requesting a summary of the space, but should divulge the above information if any member of a server could see it. It is up to the calling server to properly filter this information.

Trust is placed in the calling server: if there are any users on the calling server in the correct space, that calling server has a right to know about the rooms in that space and should return the relevant summaries, along with enough information that the calling server can then do some filtering, thus an additional field is added to the server-server response of the spaces summary:

allowed_spaces: A list of space IDs which give access to this room.

This would modify the example response given to:

{
    "rooms": [
        {
            "room_id": "!ol19s:bleecker.street",
            "avatar_url": "mxc://bleecker.street/CHEDDARandBRIE",
            "guest_can_join": false,
            "name": "CHEESE",
            "num_joined_members": 37,
            "topic": "Tasty tasty cheese",
            "world_readable": true,
            "room_type": "m.space",
            "allowed_spaces": ["!mods:example.org", "!users:example.org"]
        },
        { ... }
    ],
    "events": [
        {
            "type": "m.space.child",
            "state_key": "!efgh:example.com",
            "content": {
                "via": ["example.com"],
                "suggested": true
            },
            "room_id": "!ol19s:bleecker.street",
            "sender": "@alice:bleecker.street"
        },
        { ... }
    ]
}

Consider that Alice and Bob share a server; Alice is a member of a space, but Bob is not. The remote server will not know whether the request is on behalf of Alice or Bob (and hence whether it should share details of restricted rooms within that space).

Consider the above with a restricted room on a different server which defers access to the above space. When summarizing the space, the homeserver must make a request over federation for information on the room. The response would include the room (since Alice is able to join it), but the calling server does not know why they received the room, without additional information the server cannot properly filter the returned results.

(The alternative, where the calling server sends the requesting user_id, and the target server does the filtering, is unattractive because it rules out a future world where the calling server can cache the result.)

This does not decrease security since a server could lie and make a request on behalf of a user in the proper space to see the given information. I.e. the calling server must be trusted anyway.

Summary of the behaviour of join rules

See the join rules specification for full details, but the summary below should highlight the differences between public, invite, and restricted.

public: anyone can join, subject to ban and server_acls, as today.
invite: only people with membership invite can join, as today.
knock: the same as invite, except anyone can knock, subject to ban and server_acls. See MSC2403.
private: This is reserved and not implemented.
restricted: the same as public from the perspective of the auth rules, but with the additional caveat that servers are expected to check the allow rules before generating a join event (whether for a local or a remote user).

Security considerations

The allow feature for join_rules places increased trust in the servers in the room. We consider this acceptable: if you don't want evil servers randomly joining spurious users into your rooms, then:

Don't let evil servers in your room in the first place
Don't use allow lists, given the expansion increases the attack surface anyway by letting members in other rooms dictate who's allowed into your room.

Unstable prefix

The restricted join rule will be included in a future room version to ensure that servers and clients opt-into the new functionality.

During development it is expected that an unstable room version of org.matrix.msc3083 is used. Since the room version namespaces the behaviour, the allow key and the restricted value do not need unstable prefixes.

History / Rationale

Note that this replaces the second half of an older version of MSC2962.

It may seem that just having the allow key with public join rules is enough, as suggested in MSC2962, but there are concerns that having a public join rule that is restricted may cause issues if an implementation does not understand the semantics of the allow keyword. Using an allow key with invite join rules also does not make sense as from the perspective of the auth rules, this is akin to public (since the checking of whether a member is in the space is done during the call to /join or /make_join / /send_join).

The above concerns about an implementation not understanding the semantics of allow could be solved by introducing a new room version, but if this is done it seems clearer to just introduce a a new join rule - restricted - as described above.

Future extensions

Potential future extensions which should not be designed out include, but are not included in this MSC.

Checking space membership over federation

If a server is not in a space (and thus doesn't know the membership of a space) it cannot enforce membership of a space during a join. Peeking over federation, as described in MSC2444, could be used to establish if the user is in any of the proper spaces.

Note that there are additional security considerations with this, namely that the peek server has significant power. For example, a poorly chosen peek server could lie about the space membership and add an @evil_user:example.org to a space to gain membership to a room.

Kicking users out when they leave the allowed space

In the above example, suppose @bob:server.example leaves !users:example.org: should they be removed from the room? Likely not, by analogy with what happens when you switch the join rules from public to invite. Join rules currently govern joins, not existing room membership.

It is left to a future MSC to consider this, but some potential thoughts are given below.

If you assume that a user should be removed in this case, one option is to leave the departure up to Bob's server server.example, but this places a relatively high level of trust in that server. Additionally, if server.example were offline, other users in the room would still see Bob in the room (and their servers would attempt to send message traffic to it).

Another consideration is that users may have joined via a direct invite, not via access through a space.

Fixing this is thorny. Some sort of annotation on the membership events might help. but it's unclear what the desired semantics are:

Assuming that users in a given space are not kicked when that space is removed from allow, are those users then given a pass to remain in the room indefinitely? What happens if the space is added back to allow and then the user leaves it?
Suppose a user joins a room via a space (SpaceA). Later, SpaceB is added to the allow list and SpaceA is removed. What should happen when the user leaves SpaceB? Are they exempt from the kick?

It is possible that completely different state should be kept, or a different m.room.member state could be used in a more reasonable way to track this.

Inheriting join rules

If you make a parent space invite-only, should that (optionally?) cascade into child rooms? Seems to have some of the same problems as inheriting power levels, as discussed in MSC2962.