What I’m looking for ultimately is a universal chat type app like Beeper that can handle Signal and SMS, however, reading this about it gives me pause. It would be nice if I could get all my peeps on matrix, but since it was so hard to get them on to Signal, I think the best I can hope for is something than can handle matrix, signal, and sms. Which brings me back to the title, how exactly do Matrix bridges work and are they secure?
EDIT: SMS is insecure by its very nature, yes?
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That means Apple, Signal, WhatsApp, and a whole bunch of other services will have to interoperate by law
I don’t think Signal is big enough to be included in the requirement. and in addition to that, while the premise is pretty great I’m not that enthusiastic about Whatsapp being able to mine metadata from my conversations as a Signal user :/
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I fucking love it every time I hear about some random thing that the EU decides is unacceptable and forces corporations to be much more consumer friendly as a result
There are many different types of bridges, but the most seamless one is a type of Man In The Middle (MITM). You give the bridge full access to your other services, which allows them to copy everything to Matrix and vice versa. Naturally, this circumvents E2EE as the bridge needs to access and manipulate the content somehow (E2EE only exists up to the bridge, not the whole way to your client). The bridge can theoretically do anything, as it is a MITM. However, because most bridges are open source and you can host them yourself, the risk that unauthorised parties can gain access to the data is fairly low. If it’s hosted by a third party, you have to trust them that they won’t abuse their power.
This is a great point that you bring up. I subscribe to an IRC channel that has bridges to both Telegram and Matrix. My feelings at this point, is that the weakest link is going to be of the most concern. But how all this technology interoperate with each other and how they actually handle privacy/security together is a question I cannot answer.
