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Homeserver administration

danger

The Matrix protocol is unsafe by default. Your homeserver will be abused by malicious actors, and your resident users will receive unsolicited abuse. If you have a homeserver with public registration you will want to read this section carefully. ALL of the offered homeserver protections in this document are recommended and necessary to maintain a safe homeserver on Matrix. If you have concerns about a specific protection or use case, please reach out to us in #draupnir:matrix.org. We are happy to make changes or offer advice.

Draupnir protections & features​

Draupnir offers capabilities for homeserver admins that are particularly relevant when registration on a homeserver is open or public

These features may require either a synapse admin account or synapse-http-antispam to be available to Draupnir.

Room takedown protection​

The Room takedown protection can provide insight into the Matrix rooms your server is participating in and allow them to be blocked and taken down. This protection is essential to prevent resident users joining rooms containing CSAM or other abusive content, including receiving unsolicited invitations to such rooms.

Block invitations on server protection​

The block invitations on server protection provides invitation management. Draupnir can block invitations from users, servers, or rooms. And reject invitations sent on behalf of your users that were sent from taken down rooms when used in conjunction with the room takedown protection.

Homeserver user policy protection​

Resident user accounts can be automatically suspended via the Homeserver user policy protection when Draupnir receives a matching policy. Draupnir can also be prompted for deactivation.

Suspension and account restriction​

Resident user accounts can be managed using commands:

  • The !draupnir deactivate command will prompt for confirmation before deactivation and can optionally purge all messages. While purging messages, users will be shadowbanned.
  • The !draupnir unrestrict command can be used to unsuspend or unshadowban users.
  • The !draupnir suspend command can suspend users without logging them out.

Report forwarding​

  • Report forwarding and review: Draupnir can be used to view reports submitted by users on your homeserver.

Enabling readable abuse reports​

Draupnir offers the ability to replace the Matrix endpoint used to report abuse and display it into a room, instead of requiring you to request this data from an admin API.

This requires two configuration steps:

  1. In your Draupnir configuration file, typically /etc/draupnir/config/production.yaml, copy and paste the web section from default.yaml, if you don't have it yet (it appears with version 1.20) and set enabled: true for both web and abuseReporting.
  2. Setup a reverse proxy that will redirect requests from ^/_matrix/client/(r0|v3)/rooms/([^/]*)/report/(.*)$ to http://host:port/api/1/report/$2/$3, where host is the host where you run Draupnir, and port is the port you configured in production.yaml. For an example nginx configuration, see test/nginx.conf. It's the confirmation we use during runtime testing.

Security note​

This mechanism can extract some information from unencrypted rooms. We have taken precautions to ensure that this cannot be abused: the only case in which this feature will publish information from room foo is:

  1. If it is used by a member of room foo; AND
  2. If said member did witness the event; AND
  3. If the event was unencrypted; AND
  4. If the event was not redacted/removed/...

Essentially, this is a more restricted variant of the Admin APIs available on homeservers.

However, if you are uncomfortable with this, please do not activate this feature. Also, you should probably setup your production.yaml to ensure that the web server can only receive requests from your reverse proxy (e.g. localhost).