A Decentralised Instant Messaging Application with End-to-End Encryption

Abstract

Instant messaging applications enable users to communicate with each other in a simple and efficient manner. However, big corporations dominate and control the market today. This gives these corporations authority over their users and their data. Moreover, all popular instant messaging applications today rely on a set of centralised servers, introducing a single point of failure. The authors of this paper propose an instant messaging application that relies on a decentralised architecture, a first of its kind, hosted on the cloud, making the service fault-tolerant. Additionally, all messages being exchanged between users are End-to-End Encrypted, providing the users with privacy. The authors of this paper were able to demonstrate the proposed system working as envisioned.