Matrix is used by undercover agents and government agencies to send and receive top-secret information.
Immediately after the election of Emmanuel Macron as President of France in 2017, his team faced a huge problem - their personal correspondence was not sufficiently protected from prying eyes. Throughout their campaign, Macron and his team relied on the power of Telegram, a confidential messaging application created by Russian dissident Pavel Durov.
After Macron became president, it was necessary to protect his communication with ministers and security personnel as much as possible. Although Telegram has strict privacy standards, including multi-layered end-to-end encryption (secret chats), these features are not active by default, which poses an additional risk of data leakage. More importantly, as flawless as Durov's app was, the French government did not want their messages to be stored on the servers of a Russian company (or an American company, for that matter, which also precluded the use of Facebook's WhatsApp).
From the many available solutions, an open source project was found, for which a new end-to-end encryption protocol was developed . It received the name Matrix - its developers' offices are located in London and Rennes (France), which also suited the French government. “This is a rare case where the French and British have been able to work together effectively ,” says Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson. He and his colleague Amandine began working together on the project back in 2014 as members of the Israeli IT company Amdocs. They wanted to create a messaging system that was decentralizedrather than being run by a single company, making it secure by default. Such a system could potentially interact with other communication platforms.
The picture below shows three Matrix servers, each of which has one client connected.
All clients participate in the same Matrix room, which is synchronized between the three participating servers.
The Matrix architecture has been appealing to at least three other countries besides France itself, some security and military organizations (including the German army), and large IT corporations such as Mozilla. As of early 2021, the Matrix protocol was in use for over 28 million accounts worldwide.
Element messenger interface based on Matrix protocol.
In 2017, Hodgson and a colleague released a Matrix-based application called Element. By the end of 2021, they hope to add a feature to it that will allow users to exchange P2P messages without an Internet connection, creating Bluetooth-enabled mesh networks. "This will be a completely new way of communication - much easier and simpler than the one that is available to us now."
Immediately after the election of Emmanuel Macron as President of France in 2017, his team faced a huge problem - their personal correspondence was not sufficiently protected from prying eyes. Throughout their campaign, Macron and his team relied on the power of Telegram, a confidential messaging application created by Russian dissident Pavel Durov.
After Macron became president, it was necessary to protect his communication with ministers and security personnel as much as possible. Although Telegram has strict privacy standards, including multi-layered end-to-end encryption (secret chats), these features are not active by default, which poses an additional risk of data leakage. More importantly, as flawless as Durov's app was, the French government did not want their messages to be stored on the servers of a Russian company (or an American company, for that matter, which also precluded the use of Facebook's WhatsApp).
From the many available solutions, an open source project was found, for which a new end-to-end encryption protocol was developed . It received the name Matrix - its developers' offices are located in London and Rennes (France), which also suited the French government. “This is a rare case where the French and British have been able to work together effectively ,” says Matrix co-founder Matthew Hodgson. He and his colleague Amandine began working together on the project back in 2014 as members of the Israeli IT company Amdocs. They wanted to create a messaging system that was decentralizedrather than being run by a single company, making it secure by default. Such a system could potentially interact with other communication platforms.
At its core, Matrix is a decentralized repository of conversations, isn't it a messaging protocol? When you post a message to the Matrix, it is replicated to all the servers whose users are participating in the conversation - just like commits are replicated between Git repositories . In correspondence that spans multiple servers, there is no single point of control. This means that each server has complete sovereignty over the data of its users and it is impossible to find a specific weak point that affects the entire system.
The picture below shows three Matrix servers, each of which has one client connected.
All clients participate in the same Matrix room, which is synchronized between the three participating servers.
Anyone can use the Matrix protocol on their servers or participate in chats hosted on other servers. In France, specifically for public correspondence, the government has developed a system focused on several separate servers available to each ministry.
The Matrix architecture has been appealing to at least three other countries besides France itself, some security and military organizations (including the German army), and large IT corporations such as Mozilla. As of early 2021, the Matrix protocol was in use for over 28 million accounts worldwide.
Element messenger interface based on Matrix protocol.
In 2017, Hodgson and a colleague released a Matrix-based application called Element. By the end of 2021, they hope to add a feature to it that will allow users to exchange P2P messages without an Internet connection, creating Bluetooth-enabled mesh networks. "This will be a completely new way of communication - much easier and simpler than the one that is available to us now."
