instant messaging

Transport-Level Privacy for Instant Messaging

In this talk, I will present DenIM (Deniable Instant Messaging), a novel protocol built on the idea of hiding traffic to make it unobservable to an adversary by piggybacking it on observable traffic. We posit that resilience to traffic analysis must be directly supported by major IM services themselves, and must be done in a low-latency manner without breaking existing features. Hence, DenIM is designed both for compatibility and performance; DenIM is a variant of the Signal protocol—commonly used for strong encryption in instant messaging services, and, DenIM’s bandwidth overhead scales with the volume of regular traffic, as opposed to scaling with time or the number of users.