In advance of this year’s Human Rights Day, eQualit.ie is proud to release the first public draft of a provably secure protocol for group messaging on the Internet.
The protocol provides for end-to-end security of synchronous communications between any number of people. It is efficient and builds on recent advancements in cryptographic research. Security properties of (n+1)sec include:
- Confidentiality: the conversation is not readable to an outsider
- Forward secrecy: conversation history remains unreadable to an outsider even if participants’ encryption keys are compromised
- Deniable authentication: Nobody can prove your participation in a chat
- Authorship: A message recipient can be assured of the sender’s authenticity even if other participants in the room try to impersonate the sender
- Room consistency: Group chat participants are confident that they are in the same room
- Transcript consistency: Group chat participants are confident that they are seeing the same sequence of messages
The protocol is being implemented as a FLOSS libpurple plugin and will find its first home in crypto.cat. We anticipate wide adoption in other instant messaging platforms. Contact us, join the conversation or check out the code on Github.