Enabling encryption for bots on t2bot.io

October 30th, 2020 by TravisR

Hey all,

Over the summer Matrix announced that private rooms would be end-to-end encrypted by default - a huge achievement, however t2bot.io’s bots haven’t been able to support encryption due to several technical limitations. Starting November 28th and 29th, 2020 this will change.

We’ve deliberately picked those dates to give room admins time to decide if the bots listed below should be in their rooms. Quite a few rooms have tried to use various bots in their encrypted rooms without success and have abandoned them there. If you don’t want t2bot.io’s bots to be able to read (future) messages in your rooms, please kick them out before November 28th.

Not all bots and bridges on t2bot.io will support encryption out of the gate for various reasons, however the few that will are:

Most notably, Voyager, the Discord and Telegram bridges, and several other integrations are not listed here. Voyager isn’t included because the bot needs further updates to handle the private data contained in encrypted rooms. The bridges are excluded because they aren’t able to handle the traffic at the scale needed by t2bot.io - improvements are expected in this area over time, however.

Under the hood, t2bot.io will be using Pantalaimon to have the bots support encryption. The project doesn’t yet support cross-signing, although when it does t2bot.io will be setting that up too. Similarly, we’ll add more bots once the project gains support for media uploads. Pantalaimon doesn’t currently support bridges (appservices), and the built-in support for some of the bridges on t2bot.io would put extraordinary load on the server due to t2bot.io’s size.

In terms of timelines, much of this has been in testing for most of the year to ensure that the server will be able to handle the additional traffic and requests that come with encryption. Now t2bot.io is at the stage where it can start rolling it out to most integrations. Between now and November 28th/29th, t2bot.io will be making some infrastructure changes to better support these bots, such as setting up additional Synapse workers and deploying Pantalaimon to a more suitable location - some interruptions may occur, though they are expected to be minimal. Stay up to date with the deployment by watching #status:t2bot.io on Matrix.

Later on, the bots will support being verified however in the interim they'll all appear with grey shields in Element. The public key information for each bot will also be posted on the t2bot.io website for manual verification, for those that need to verify the bots to have them receive messages you send.

For more information, visit #help:t2bot.io on Matrix.

Thanks,
TravisR, t2bot.io

Icon graphics sourced from matrix-react-sdk under Apache 2.0: Green Shield | Red Shield | Colours