Abstract
In a survey of six widely used end-to-end encrypted messaging applications, we consider the post-compromise recovery process from the perspective of what security audit functions, if any, are in place to detect and recover from attacks. Our investigation reveals audit functions vary in the extent to which they rely on the end user. We argue developers should minimize dependence on users and view them as a residual, not primary, risk mitigation strategy. To provide robust communications security, E2EE applications need to avoid protocol designs that dump too much responsibility on naive users and instead make system components play an appropriate role.
J. Blessing and P. D. Chowdhury–These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Notes
- 1.
We were unable to make contact with Wickr Me.
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Acknowledgements
– We thank Bruce Christianson for the discussions and feedback reflected in the paper.
– This University of Bristol team is supported by REPHRAIN: National Research centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence online (EPSRC Grant: EP/V011189/1).
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Blessing, J., Chowdhury, P.D., Sameen, M., Anderson, R., Gardiner, J., Rashid, A. (2023). Towards Human-Centric Endpoint Security. In: Stajano, F., Matyáš, V., Christianson, B., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXVIII. Security Protocols 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43033-6_21
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