Secure Contact Agreement Protocol for Messenger Services Through Randomized ID Assignments

Abstract

Messenger services have over the recent decade been the most dominant, ubiquitous, and widespread form of communication globally. While the service has evolved to enable reliable real-time communication between people across different technologies, there have been privacy and security concerns that were initially remediated by implementing TLS/SSL and E2E Encryption as a standard. However, new privacy challenges and security gaps have been identified and exploited through the capture and analysis of communication traffic metadata. These methods exploit the use of readily available advanced machine learning and data mining algorithms to identify users’ communication networks and patterns without reading the actual messages sent between end-users just by analyzing readily available metadata such as the sender and receiver IDs, time sent, and communication frequency. To close these gaps the need to anonymize users’ communications while maintaining reliable contact with each other is necessary. Randomized anonymization of metadata parameters can ensure it becomes nearly impossible for current analytics algorithms to identify user patterns from communication traffic over time. Also, to guarantee seamless communication between users with changing identities there needs to be a real-time contact exchange protocol enabling users to randomly change their IDs and secretly inform other users in their contacts without the physical intervention or involvement of the human user. This research paper proposes a solution through the use of a randomized contact reassignment and exchange protocol by using the PKI encryption protocol to share its new identity with its existing contacts defeating the creation of traceable logs over time.