MSC2228: Self destructing events

proposals/2228-self-destructing-events.md

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+# Proposal for self-destructing messages
+
+It's useful for users to be able to send sensitive messages within a
+conversation which should be removed after the target user(s) has read them.
+This can be achieved today by the sender redacting the message after the
+receipient(s) have read them, but this is a tedious manual process. This
+proposal provides a way of automating this process.
+
+Originally [MSC1763](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1763)
+attempted to solve this by applying retention limits on a per-message basis
+and purging expired messages from the server; in practice this approach is
+flawed because purging messages fragments the DAG, breaking back-pagination
+and potentially causing performance problems.  Also, the ability to set an
+expiration timestamp relative to the send (rather than read) time is not of
+obvious value.  Therefore the concept of self-destructing messsages was 
+split out into this independent proposal.
+
+## Proposal
+
+Users can specify that a message should self-destruct by adding the following
+field to any event's content:
+
+`m.self_destruct`:
+  the duration in milliseconds after which the participating servers should
+  redact this event on behalf of the sender, after seeing an explicit read
+  receipt delivered for the message from all users in the room. Must be null
+  or an integer in range [0, 2<sup>31</sup>-1]. If absent, or null, this
+  behaviour does not take effect.
+
+Clients and servers MUST send explicit read receipts per-message for
+self-destructing messages (rather than for the most recently read message,
+as is the normal operation), so that messages can be destructed as requested.
+
+The `m.self_destruct` field is not preserved over redaction (and
+self-destructing messages may be redacted to speed up the self-destruct
+process if desired).
+
+E2E encrypted messages must store the `m.self_destruct` field outside of the
+encrypted contents of the message, given the server needs to be able to act on
+it.
+
+## Server-side behaviour
+
+When a client sends a message with `m.self_destruct` true, the servers
+participating in a room should start monitoring the room for read receipts for
+the event in question.
+
+Once a given server has received a read receipt for this message from a member
+in the room (other than the sender), then the message's self-destruct timer
+should be started for that user.  Once the timer is complete, the server
+should redact the event from that member's perspective, and send the user a
+synthetic `m.redaction` event in the room to the reader's clients on behalf of
+the sender.
+
+## Client-side behaviour
+
+Clients should display self-destructing events in a clearly distinguished
+manner in the timeline.  Details of the lifespan can be shown on demand
+however, although a visible countdown is recommended.
+
+Clients should locally remove self-destructing events as if they have been
+redacted N milliseconds after first attempting to send the read receipt for the
+message in question.  The synthetic redaction event sent by the local server
+then acts as a fallback for clients which fail to implement special UI for
+self-destructing messages.
+
+## Tradeoffs
+
+We could purge rather than redact destructed messages from the DB, but that
+would fragment the DAG so we don't do that.
+
+We could have the sending server send an explicit redaction event on behalf of
+the sender rather than synthesise a redaction on the various participating
+servers.  However, this would clog up the DAG with a redundant event, and also
+introduce unreliability if the sending server is unavailable or delayed.  It
+would  also result in all users redacting the message the same time. Therefore
+synthetic per-user redaction events (which are only for backwards
+compatibility anyway) feel like the lesser evil.
+
+We could let the user specify an expiry time for messages relative to when
+they were sent rather than when they were read.  However, I can't think of a
+good enough use case to justify complicating the proposal with that feature.
+We can extend if/when that use case emerges.
+
+## Issues
+
+We should probably ignore missing read receipts from bots when deciding
+whether to self-destruct.  This is blocked on having a good way to identify
+bots.
+
+The behaviour for rooms with more than 2 participants ends up being a bit
+strange. The client (and server) starts the expiry countdown on the message as
+soon as the participant has read it.  This means that someone can look over
+the shoulder of another user to see the content again.  This is probably a
+feature rather than a bug(?)
+
+## Security considerations
+
+There's scope for abuse where users can send obnoxious self-destructing messages
+into a room.
+
+One solution for this could be for server implementations to implement a
+quarantine mode which initially marks redacted events as quarantined for N days
+before deleting them entirely, allowing server admins to address abuse concerns.
+This is of course true for redactions in general.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+This provides a simple and pragmatic way of automating the process of manually
+redacting sensitive messages once the recipients have read them.