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1. End-to-End Secure Mobile Group Messaging with Conversation Integrity and Deniability

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3338498.3358644  

   Schliep, Michael; Hopper, Nicholas (November 2019, Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society)

   In this paper, we describe Mobile CoWPI, a deployable, end-to-end secure mobile group messaging application with proofs of security. Mobile CoWPI allows dynamic groups of users to participate in, join, and leave private, authenticated conversations without requiring the participants to be simultaneously online or maintain reliable network connectivity. We identify the limitations of mobile messaging and how they affect conversational integrity and deniability. We define strong models of these security properties, prove that Mobile CoWPI satisfies these properties, and argue that no protocol that satisfies these properties can be more scalable than Mobile CoWPI. We also describe an implementation of Mobile CoWPI and show through experiments that it is suitable for use in real-world messaging conditions. 

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2. Universally Composable End-to-End Secure Messaging

   Canetti, Ran; Jain, Palak; Swanberg, Marika; Varia, Mayank (August 2022, 42nd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2022)

   We model and analyze the Signal end-to-end messaging protocol within the UC framework. In particular: - We formulate an ideal functionality that captures end-to-end secure messaging, in a setting with PKI and an untrusted server, against an adversary that has full control over the network and can adaptively and momentarily compromise parties at any time and obtain their entire internal states. In particular our analysis captures the forward secrecy and recovery-of-security properties of Signal and the conditions under which they break. - We model the main components of the Signal architecture (PKI and long-term keys, the backbone continuous-key-exchange or "asymmetric ratchet," epoch-level symmetric ratchets, authenticated encryption) as individual ideal functionalities that are realized and analyzed separately and then composed using the UC and Global-State UC theorems. - We show how the ideal functionalities representing these components can be realized using standard cryptographic primitives under minimal hardness assumptions. Our modeling introduces additional innovations that enable arguing about the security of Signal irrespective of the underlying communication medium, as well as secure composition of dynamically generated modules that share state. These features, together with the basic modularity of the UC framework, will hopefully facilitate the use of both Signal-as-a-whole and its individual components within cryptographic applications. Two other features of our modeling are the treatment of fully adaptive corruptions, and making minimal use of random oracle abstractions. In particular, we show how to realize continuous key exchange in the plain model, while preserving security against adaptive corruptions. 

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3. XRD: Scalable Messaging System with Cryptographic Privacy

   Kwon, Albert; Lu, David; Devadas, Srinivas (February 2020, 17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation)

   Even as end-to-end encrypted communication becomes more popular, private messaging remains a challenging problem due to metadata leakages, such as who is communicating with whom. Most existing systems that hide communication metadata either (1) do not scale easily, (2) incur significant overheads, or (3) provide weaker guarantees than cryptographic privacy, such as differential privacy or heuristic privacy. This paper presents XRD (short for Crossroads), a metadata private messaging system that provides cryptographic privacy, while scaling easily to support more users by adding more servers. At a high level, XRD uses multiple mix networks in parallel with several techniques, including a novel technique we call aggregate hybrid shuffle. As a result, XRD can support 2 million users with 228 seconds of latency with 100 servers. This is 13.3x and 4x faster than Atom and Pung, respectively, which are prior scalable messaging systems with cryptographic privacy. 

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4. Onion Franking: Abuse Reports for Mix-Based Private Messaging

   Gregoire, Matthew; Pierce, Margaret; Eskandarian, Saba (February 2025, NDSS 2025)

   The fast-paced development and deployment of private messaging applications demands mechanisms to protect against the concomitant potential for abuse. While widely used end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging systems have deployed mechanisms for users to verifiably report abusive messages without compromising the privacy of unreported messages, abuse reporting schemes for systems that additionally protect message metadata are still in their infancy. Existing solutions either focus on a relatively small portion of the design space or incur much higher communication and computation costs than their E2EE brethren. This paper introduces new abuse reporting mechanisms that work for any private messaging system based on onion encryption. This includes low-latency systems that employ heuristic or opportunistic mixing of user traffic, as well as schemes based on mixnets. Along the way, we show that design decisions and abstractions that are well-suited to the E2EE setting may actually impede security and performance improvements in the metadata-hiding setting. We also explore stronger threat models for abuse reporting and moderation not explored in prior work, showing where prior work falls short and how to strengthen both our scheme and others'—including deployed E2EE messaging platforms—to achieve higher levels of security. We implement a prototype of our scheme and find that it outperforms the best known solutions in this setting by well over an order of magnitude for each step of the message delivery and reporting process, with overheads almost matching those of message franking techniques used by E2EE encrypted messaging apps today. 

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5. Abuse Reporting for Metadata-Hiding Communication Based on Secret Sharing

   Eskandarian, Saba (August 2024, USENIX Security 2024)

   As interest in metadata-hiding communication grows in both research and practice, a need exists for stronger abuse reporting features on metadata-hiding platforms. While message franking has been deployed on major end-to-end encrypted platforms as a lightweight and effective abuse reporting feature, there is no comparable technique for metadata-hiding platforms. Existing efforts to support abuse reporting in this setting, such as asymmetric message franking or the Hecate scheme, require order of magnitude increases in client and server computation or fundamental changes to the architecture of messaging systems. As a result, while metadata-hiding communication inches closer to practice, critical content moderation concerns remain unaddressed. This paper demonstrates that, for broad classes of metadata-hiding schemes, lightweight abuse reporting can be deployed with minimal changes to the overall architecture of the system. Our insight is that much of the structure needed to support abuse reporting already exists in these schemes. By taking a non-generic approach, we can reuse this structure to achieve abuse reporting with minimal overhead. In particular, we show how to modify schemes based on secret sharing user inputs to support a message franking-style protocol. Compared to prior work, our shared franking technique more than halves the time to prepare a franked message and gives order of magnitude reductions in server-side message processing times, as well as in the time to decrypt a message and verify a report. 

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