A survey on the security protocols employed by mobile messaging applications

Ștefania Andrieș; Andrei-Daniel Miron; Andrei Cristian; Emil Simion

Paper 2022/088

A survey on the security protocols employed by mobile messaging applications

Ștefania Andrieș, Andrei-Daniel Miron, Andrei Cristian, and Emil Simion

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increase in the popularity of messaging applications that use end-to-end encryption. Among them were Telegram (in October 2021 it has 550 million active users), Signal (in January 2022 it has over 50 million downloads in the Google Play Store), WhatsApp (according to Statista, in 2021 it has over 2 billion active users), Wire (until January 2022 it has been downloaded for over 1 million times on Android devices). Two distinct protocols underlying these applications are noted: MTProto (developed in Russia by Nikolai Durov) and Signal (developed in the US by Moxie Marlinspike). This paper presents the two protocols and examines from the point of view of the primitive cryptographic security used and how the authenticated encryption, key derivation and asynchronous messaging are performed.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: MTProto Signal End-to-End Encryption Messaging apps
Contact author(s): stefania andries21 @ gmail com
danielandrei161 @ gmail com
andrecristian6 @ protonmail com
emil simion @ upb ro
History: 2022-01-25: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2022/088
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/088,
      author = {Ștefania Andrieș and Andrei-Daniel Miron and Andrei Cristian and Emil Simion},
      title = {A survey on the security protocols employed by mobile messaging applications},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/088},
      year = {2022},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/088}
}