End-to-end secure and privacy preserving mobile chat application

Abstract

Since the 1990s, two technologies have reshaped how we see and experience the world around us. These technologies are the Internet and mobile communication, especially smartphones. The Internet provides a cheap and convenient way to explore and communicate with distant people. A multitude of services have converged on the smartphone platform, and potentially the most notable is social networking. With increased interconnectivity and use of online services, concerns about consumers' security and privacy are growing. In this paper, we evaluate the security- and privacy-preserving features provided by existing mobile chat services. This paper also puts forwards a basic framework for an End-to-End (E2E) security and privacy-preserving mobile chat service and associated requirements. We implemented the proposal to provide proof-of-concept and evaluate the technical difficulty of satisfying the stipulated security and privacy requirements. © 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.