Tag: secure messaging

6 articles
Date Thu 16 June 2022
Authors Angèle Bossuat, Laurent Grémy
Category Cryptography

In the first part of the blogpost, we tackled the issue of 1v1 conversations, and it is now time to see how this applies to 1vMANY: group chats! We will give an overview of current solutions, and then have a look at the Messaging Layer Security working group.

Date Tue 24 May 2022
Authors Angèle Bossuat, Laurent Grémy
Category Cryptography

Today's communications are, as frequently requested by users, more and more secure. In this first part of the blogpost, we will detail some key features of instant messaging applications, in the setting where (only) two parties want to communicate.

Date Thu 14 October 2021
Author Adrien Guinet
Category Cryptography

This blog post introduces a plugin that provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to Mattermost.

Date Thu 29 April 2021
Authors Marwan Anastas, Charlie Boulo
Category Software

Oxen [1] mandated Quarkslab to perform an audit of their instant messaging solution Session [2]. This application, forked from Signal, aims to improve users privacy by using an onion routing mechanism [3]. This mechanism differs from Tor's one by requiring a deposit in their own cryptocurrency to operate a Service Node (Snode [4] ), the Oxen equivalent of a Tor Entry, Relay or Exit Node. While reviewing the architecture of this solution, we found some issues and provided recommendations to improve parts of the implementations.

Date Wed 08 March 2017
Author Jean-Baptiste Bédrune
Category Cryptography

In recent weeks, Confide, a secure instant messaging application, has gained popularity in some circles. This article presents a quick assessment of the security of this application. The official website boasts the confidentiality provided by the product through three qualifiers: encrypted, ephemeral and screenshot protected. Each of these aspects will be studied.

The encryption protocol will be particularly detailed because it is tagged as battle tested, military grade cryptography. We already knew about military grade cryptography, which seems to be a synonym of put AES-256 somewhere, no matter how you use it in many applications, but we had never heard of battle tested cryptography. This article is an opportunity to present this technology.

Developing properly end-to-end communication systems is complex. As we have seen in the past with iMessage, even if cryptographic primitives are correctly implemented and encryption keys are correctly generated and protected, the design is critical to forbid the service operator from being able to eavesdrop messages.

Date Thu 25 June 2015
Authors Sébastien Kaczmarek, Cyril Cattiaux
Category Pentest

In 2014, QuarksLab was missioned by OpenITP [1] to audit the iOS application ChatSecure and to identify any weakness that could lead to information leakage or any other risk that could impact the user.