Group Instant Messaging: Why blaming developers is not fair but enhancing the protocols would be appropriate

After presenting our work at Real World Crypto 2018 [1] and seeing the enormous press coverage, we want to get two things straight: 1. Most described weaknesses are only exploitable by the malicious server or by knowing a large secret number and thereby the protocols are still very secure (what we wrote in the paper but some newspapers did not adopt) and 2. we see ways to enhance the WhatsApp protocol without breaking its features.

Insecurities of WhatsApp's, Signal's, and Threema's Group Chats

Recently, the theoretical and practical analysis of secure instant messenger protocols received much attention, but the focus of prior evaluations mostly lay in one-to-one communication. In this blog post we want to presents the results of our work that focuses on group chat protocols of three major instant messenger applications; namely Signal, WhatsApp, and Threema.

In this blog post, we aim to focus on the practical impact and the found weaknesses identified by our analysis. The interested reader may also look into our paper for more details.

How Secure is TextSecure?

Instant Messaging has attracted a lot of attention by users for both private and business communication and has especially gained popularity as low-cost short message replacement on mobile devices. However, most popular mobile messaging apps do not provide end-to-end security. Press releases about mass surveillance performed by intelligence services such as NSA and GCHQ lead many people looking for means that allow them to preserve the security and privacy of their communication on the Internet. Additionally fueled by Facebook's acquisition of the hugely popular messaging app WhatsApp, alternatives that claim to provide secure communication experienced a significant increase of new users.