Another of the features I'd wanted to add to Freedombone for a long time was server notifications via XMPP, and now that has been added. This is for things like notification that an upgrade or security test has failed or that the tripwire has been triggered. Previously those notifications were only via email, but I'm not very obsessive about email and rarely check it, whereas instant messages are much more likely to get my attention.

The security policy for XMPP chat was previously set such that end-to-end security was required, but it was difficult to automatically send out an OMEMO encrypted message from the server and so I've had to downgrade end-to-end security to being optional. This is not ideal, but the tradeoff between having to deal with folks trying to send me plaintext messages and being promptly alerted if something has failed on the server is probably worth it. Longer term I'd like to figure out if I can automatically generate OMEMO messages and then I can return to a better security policy.

The main factor which delayed the implementation of this was the question of needing to generate a separate XMPP account on the server to push out notifications. I didn't really want there to be a permanent separate account with a password lingering around somewhere which could become a possible security vulnerability. The solution to this was to generate an ephemeral account purely for the purpose of sending a single message. A new notification XMPP account gets created with a random password, sends the message and then about one second later the account is deleted. Even if the account credentials were to leak during the sending of a plaintext message they can't subsequently be useful to a potential adversary.

Another addition to the notifications system is being able to send a webcam photo if the USB canary is triggered. The purpose of that is to answer the paranoid question "Is anyone trying to mess with the server while I'm not at home?" if you're out shopping or at work. The particular threat model is known as evil maid. If you're running Freedombone on an old laptop and have a secondary webcam plugged it it will preferentially use that, so that you can set up the field of view appropriately. Not many people will need this level of physical device security, but it's nice to have the option. Also if you have the Syncthing app installed then any USB canary photo will be synced to the admin account.