Paper Info
Title
The Snowden Phone: A Comparative Survey of Secure Instant Messaging Mobile Applications (authors' version).
Abstract
In recent years, it has come to attention that governments have been doing mass surveillance of personal communications without the consent of the citizens. As a consequence of these revelations, developers have begun releasing new protocols for end-to-end encrypted conversations, extending and making popular the old Off-the-Record protocol. Several new implementations of such end-to-end encrypted messaging protocols have appeared, and commonly used chat applications have been updated with these implementations as well. In this survey, we compare the existing implementations, where most of them implement one of the recent and popular protocols called Signal. We conduct a series of experiments on these implementations to identify which types of security and usability properties each application provides. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the applications have variations of usability and security properties, and none of them are infallible. Finally, the paper gives proposals for improving each application w.r.t. security, privacy, and usability.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
arXiv: Cryptography and Security
Instant messaging,Computer security,Computer science,Usability,Encryption,Implementation,Phone,Security properties
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1807.07952
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian Johansen113.40
Aulon Mujaj200.34
Hamed Arshad32427.14
Josef Noll401.01