[dba-Tech] A protocol for distributed multiparty chat encryption

[Jim Lawrence]

There are many programs that will allow a couple of people to converse without the fear of state interests, business competitors or cyber criminals. Until now there has been no definitive protocol or technology that could allow anyone, to have a group conversation, without fear of their privacy being threatened. 

That was until now. Introducing (n+1)sec protocol. (n+1)sec, is a free (libre), end-to-end secure, synchronous protocol for group chat developed by eQualit. This protocol can be used with any number of secure chat programs as it just provides the API-libraries which can be subsequently buried in the code.

The protocol handles the six security requirements:

Confidentiality: the conversation is not readable to an outsider
Forward secrecy: conversation history remains unreadable to an outsider even if participants’ encryption keys are compromised
Deniable authentication: Nobody can prove your participation in a chat
Authorship: A message recipient can be assured of the sender’s authenticity even if other participants in the room try to impersonate the sender
Room consistency: Group chat participants are confident that they are in the same room
Transcript consistency:  Group chat participants are confident that they are seeing the same sequence of messages

Though the protocol can not be fully tested as there is no fully operational application available but there is a Pidgin browse plugin (RC chat app) for playing with. Also all the code is available on GitHub for review and download.

https://equalit.ie/introducing-n1sec-a-protocol-for-distributed-multiparty-chat-encryption/
http://bit.ly/2vUjv17

Jim