Research on the Secure Communication Model of Instant Messaging

Abstract

People more and more concern about the security and usability of instant messaging applications as they have been widely used in our daily life and work. This paper analyzes the secure communication models of international popular instant messaging including message encryption as well as process of message sending and receiving in detail. For the aspect of usability, we present the principles of message forwarding in scenarios of group chat and multi-device online under different encryption modes. In addition, we design a secure communication model in the end-to-end encryption mode for multi-device online case, which effectively improves the security level of multi-device communication since the current encryption in this case only supports a weaker end-to-server mode. In fact, the secure communication model we designed is not limited to instant messaging, but also can be conveniently applied to communication scenarios with strict and necessary requirements for privacy protection, such as sensitive information of authorization and device configuration on multiple devices.