Abstract: Instant messaging services have gone from a niche application used on desktop computers to the most prevalent form of communication in the world, due in large part to the growth of Internet enabled phones and tablets. Messaging services, like Apple iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Viber, handle tens of billions of messages each day from an international user base of over one billion people. Given the volume of messages traversing these services and ongoing concerns over widespread eavesdropping of Internet communications, it is not surprising that privacy has been an important topic for both the users and service providers. To protect user privacy, these messaging services offer transport layer encryption technologies to protect messages in transit, and some services, like iMessage and Telegram, offer end-to-end encryption to ensure that not even the providers themselves can eavesdrop on the messages. As previous experience with Voice-over-IP and HTTP tunnels has shown us, however, the use of state-of-theart encryption technologies is no guarantee of privacy for the underlying message content. In this paper, we analyze the network traffic of popular encrypted messaging services. (1) To understand the breadth and depth of their information leakage, (2) Determine if attacks are generalizable across services and (3) Calculate the potential costs of protecting against this leakage.
Keywords: communication, encryption, services, privacy, messages, Internet.
Title: Traffic Diagnosis for Encrypted Messaging Services: Whatsapp, Apple Imessage and Many More
Author: Sumanth Reddy Devi Reddy, Prof Tarik El Taeib
International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology Research,
ISSN 2348-1196 (print), ISSN 2348-120X (online)
Research Publish Journals
