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Restricting room membership based on membership in other rooms

A desirable feature is to give room admins the power to restrict membership of their room based on the membership of one or more rooms.

Potential usecases include:

Private spaces (allowing any member of a MSC1772 space to join child rooms in that space), for example:

members of the #doglovers:example.com space can join this room without an invitation¹
Room upgrades for private rooms (instead of issuing invites to each user).
Allowing all users in a private room to be able to join a private breakout room.

This does not preclude members from being directly invited to the room, which is still a useful discovery feature.

Proposal

In a future room version 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": [
            {
                "type": "m.room_membership",
                "room_id": "!mods:example.org"
            },
            {
                "type": "m.room_membership",
                "room_id": "!users:example.org"
            }
        ]
    }
}

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

type: "m.room_membership" to describe that we are allowing access via room membership. Future MSCs may define other types.
room_id: The room ID to check the membership of.

Any entries in the list which do not match the expected format are ignored. Thus, if all entries are invalid, the list behaves as if empty and all users without an invite are rejected.

The allow key is to be protected when redacting an event.

When a homeserver receives a /join request from a client or a /make_join / /send_join request from another homeserver, the request should only be permitted if the user is invited to this room, or is joined to one of the listed rooms. If the user is not a member of at least one of the rooms, the homeserver should return an error response with HTTP status code of 403 and an errcode of M_FORBIDDEN.

It is possible for a resident homeserver (one which receives a /make_join / /send_join request) to not know if the user is in some of the allowed rooms (due to not participating in them). If the user is not in any of the allowed rooms that are known to the homeserver, and the homeserver is not participating in all listed rooms, then it should return an error response with HTTP status code of 400 with an errcode of M_UNABLE_TO_AUTHORISE_JOIN. The joining server should attempt to join via another resident homeserver. If the resident homeserver knows that the user is not in any of the allowed rooms it should return an error response with HTTP status code of 403 and an errcode of M_FORBIDDEN. Note that it is a configuration error if there are allowed rooms with no participating authorised servers.

A chosen resident homeserver might also be unable to issue invites (which, as below, is a pre-requisite for generating a correctly-signed join event). In this case it should return an error response with HTTP status code of 400 and an errcode of M_UNABLE_TO_GRANT_JOIN. The joining server should attempt to join via another resident homeserver.

From the perspective of the auth rules, the restricted join rule has the same behavior as public, with the additional caveat that servers must ensure that, for m.room.member events with a membership of join:

The user's previous membership was invite or join, or
The join event has a valid signature from a homeserver whose users have the power to issue invites.

When generating a join event for /join or /make_join, the server should include the MXID of a local user who could issue an invite in the content with the key join_authorised_via_users_server. The actual user chosen is arbitrary.

The changes to the auth rules imply that:

A join event issued via /send_join is signed by not just the requesting server, but also the resident server.³

In order for the joining server to receive the proper signatures the join event will be returned via /send_join in the event field.
The auth chain of the join event needs to include events which prove the homeserver can be issuing the join. This can be done by including:
- The m.room.power_levels event.
- The join event of the user specified in join_authorised_via_users_server.
It should be confirmed that the authorising user is in the room. (This prevents situations where any homeserver could process the join, even if they weren't in the room, under certain power level conditions.)

The above creates a new restriction on the relationship between the resident servers used for /make_join and /send_join -- they must now both go to the same server (since the join_authorised_via_users_server is added in the call to /make_join, while the final signature is added during the call to /send_join). If a request to /send_join is received that includes an event from a different resident server it should return an error response with HTTP status code of 400.

Note that the homeservers whose users can issue invites are trusted to confirm that the allow rules were properly checked (since this cannot easily be enforced over federation by event authorisation).⁴

To better cope with joining via aliases, homeservers should use the list of authorised servers (not the list of candidate servers) when a user attempts to join a room.

Summary of the behaviour of join rules

See the join rules specification for full details; the summary below is meant to highlight the differences between public, invite, and restricted from a user perspective. Note that all join rules are subject to ban and server_acls.

public: anyone can join, as today.
invite: only people with membership invite can join, as today.
knock: the same as invite, except anyone can knock. See MSC2403.
private: This is reserved, but unspecified.
restricted: the same as invite, except users may also join if they are a member of a room listed in the allow rules.

Security considerations

Increased trust to enforce the join rules during calls to /join, /make_join, and /send_join is placed in the homeservers whose users can issue invites. Although it is possible for those homeservers to issue a join event in bad faith, there is no real-world benefit to doing this as those homeservers could easily side-step the restriction by issuing an invite first anyway.

Unstable prefix

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

During development, an unstable room version of org.matrix.msc3083.v2 will be used. Since the room version namespaces the behaviour, the allow key and value, as well as the restricted join rule value do not need unstable prefixes.

An unstable key of org.matrix.msc3083.v2.event will be used in the response from /send_join in place of event during development.

Alternatives

It may seem that just having the allow key with public join rules is enough (as originally suggested in MSC2962), but there are concerns that changing the behaviour of a pre-existing public join rule may cause security issues in older implementations (that do not yet understand the new behaviour). This could be solved by introducing a new room version, thus it seems clearer to introduce a new join rule -- restricted.

Using an allow key with the invite join rules to broaden who can join was rejected as an option since it requires weakening the auth rules. From the perspective of the auth rules, the restricted join rule is identical to public with additional checks on the signature of the event.

Future extensions

Checking room membership over federation

If a homeserver is not in an allowed room (and thus doesn't know the membership of it) then the server cannot enforce the membership checks while generating a join event. Peeking over federation, as described in MSC2444, could be used to establish if the user is in any of the proper rooms.

This would then delegate power out to a (potentially) untrusted server, giving that peek server significant power. For example, a poorly chosen peek server could lie about the room membership and add an @evil_user:example.org to an allowed room to gain membership to a room.

As iterated above, this MSC recommends rejecting the join, potentially allowing the requesting homeserver to retry via another homeserver.

Kicking users out when they leave the allowed room

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 room.

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 an allowed room are not kicked when that room is removed from allow, are those users then given a pass to remain in the room indefinitely? What happens if the room is added back to allow and then the user leaves it?
Suppose a user joins a room via an allowed room (RoomA). Later, RoomB is added to the allow list and RoomA is removed. What should happen when the user leaves RoomB? 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 an allowed room is a space and you make a parent space invite-only, should that (optionally?) cascade into child rooms? This would have some of the same problems as inheriting power levels, as discussed in MSC2962.

Additional allow types

Future MSCs may wish to define additional values for the type argument, potentially restricting access via:

MXIDs or servers.
A shared secret (room password).

These are just examples and are not fully thought through for this MSC, but it should be possible to add these behaviors in the future.

Client considerations

MSC1772 defines a via key in the content of m.space.child events:

the content must contain a via key which gives a list of candidate servers that can be used to join the room.

It is possible for the list of candidate servers and the list of authorised servers to diverge. It may not be possible for a user to join a room if there's no overlap between these lists.

If there is some overlap between the lists of servers the join request should complete successfully.

Clients should also consider the authorised servers when generating candidate servers to embed in links to the room, e.g. via matrix.to.

A future MSC may define a way to override or update the via key in a coherent manner.