Usernames with uppercase chars can no longer log in

[bones-was-here]

Background information

• Dendrite version or git SHA: 002c3e0a5ff18c0b36c4c8e6cebea61547c9ac51
• Monolith or Polylith?: Monolith
• SQLite3 or Postgres?: Postgres
• Running in Docker?: no
• go version: 1.17.5

Description

If a user has created an account with create-account and their username contains a capital letter, they can no longer log in.

Steps to reproduce

• create-account --username "Test" --password "SomePassword"
• try to log in with version 388d7a197446bce5493c52d36affecf0cf706296 or later

We have had such an account for a long time now and were unaware it was not compliant with the spec. Is this going to cause federation problems for the rooms? How can we recover from the situation?

[kegsay]

It shouldn't cause federation problems as there are existing matrix user IDs on matrix.org which also have upper-case letters.

[hoernschen]

I would like to get into developing for this project and wanted to start with this issue. But I am not completely sure what the expected behaviour should be here. Should the login also support old uppercase usernames or be completely not case sensitive?

[kegsay]

It should be completely not case-sensitive.

[DefaultUser]

While it was possible to log in with a username with uppercase characters after https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/commit/1d5fd99cad518dcd7d387aa950c54a710452b71f, it is again no longer possible. I assume it was this change: https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/commit/c36e4546c36a3381814cd72930349a0df21b1dd4#diff-62b3ac909bbc9d2680fa82b61540fd0ef7ad94417d9d07582c898655dd6c6d4cR65

[bones-was-here]

"Fixed" by adding a line to the build script... sed -i 's/username := strings.ToLower(r.Username())/username := r.Username()/' clientapi/auth/password.go

It should be completely not case-sensitive.

Forcing to lower case is not the same as case insensitivity...

[avdb13]

Forcing to lower case is not the same as case insensitivity...

This is indeed true but if you want to have case insensitivity you'd have to change it all the way down to the database level which might break compatibility with a lot of other parts of the code. As for as I know SQLite supports case-insensitive comparisons for ASCII characters but for PostgreSQL the citext extension would be required.

[bones-was-here]

Forcing to lower case is not the same as case insensitivity...

This is indeed true but if you want to have case insensitivity you'd have to change it all the way down to the database level which might break compatibility with a lot of other parts of the code. As for as I know SQLite supports case-insensitive comparisons for ASCII characters but for PostgreSQL the citext extension would be required.

No, how it's supposed to work (at least according to MSC threads) is:

1. "under the hood" (in the DB, in federation traffic, in JSON) the usernames are fully case sensitive and case is always preserved
2. Authentication (logging in) is supposed to be case insensitive
3. Account creation should fail when there's an existing username that differs from the new one only by case

Dendrite succeeds at 1 and fails at 2 and 3.

[avdb13]

I see, how would 2 and 3 be accomplished without just converting the username to lowercase during authentication and registration?

[bones-was-here]

I see, how would 2 and 3 be accomplished without just converting the username to lowercase during authentication and registration?

New accounts are easy: just squash to lowercase or refuse to create the account unless it's all lowercase. This needs to apply to the create-account binary as well as the online registration methods.
Unfortunately there's probably some cases where the Application Service needs to be able to create multiple accounts that differ only by case, for bridging to networks that allow it.

Authentication requires something like https://pkg.go.dev/strings#EqualFold

[spaetz]

This would let you create account 'admin' when there is already an 'Admin' account.

[bones-was-here]

Oh true, so I guess it would have to use case folding when checking if the account already exists.

[paride]

I'm a user stuck with a username with an uppercase letter. I'd definitely appreciate a migration path to a compliant username (e.g. creation of the lowercase username with deactivation of the non-compliant username).

[bones-was-here]

This appears to have been fixed at some point, on 0.10.8 I can log in to accounts with capitals provided I exactly match the case of the localpart column in userapi_accounts. The sed patch above is no longer needed or applicable.