Open BillCarsonFr opened 2 weeks ago
I wrote some notes on how we might do this for web at https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/issues/27009.
Notes:
Question: is there any value in attempting to download individual keys on-demand once the full backup has been successfully downloaded? I'd think not?
Context
We implemented a recent change to the way we get the room keys from backup. Previously, the full backup was downloaded after verification, as soon as the backup decryption key was known, but that did not result in a good user experience when your backup was too big. The time to download the full backup and decrypt it could be taking 10s of minutes depending on the platform.
In order to improve that (and in the absence of pagination for the backup), keys are now downloaded on-demand when we try to decrypt an historical message. This results in a better user experience, as the messages get decrypted faster after a new login.
Problem
With this new way of getting the keys, all user sessions will now have only a partial set of the backed up keys. This can cause key loss if for example a user tries to reset his backup (without importing first from the previous backup).
Notice that the previous implementation of full backup import has several issues:
Solution
We want to ensure that each new client gets a copy of all the keys in backup as soon as it can. The operation should be resilient to app restart and should have an API [richvdh: or, more to the point: a UI?] to report progress.
Related/Existing issues