(Disclaimer: all the tests reported here were performed in the summer of 2017, and since applications in this area are very dynamic some of the specific implementation recommendations and observations that we make may have already been treated by the developers.
When Edward Snowden published the secret papers about NSA ( and two feature films on this topic are as follows: Oliver Stone’s (film) and Laura Poitras’ ), people finally understood that mass surveillance was an issue, and secure mobile messengers became more critical and popular. The popular messaging tools used in recent years did not support end-to-end encryption, only standard client-to-server encryption, which gives the service providers access to more private information than necessary. New messaging applications started to emerge and try to replace traditional SMS, but building them with security and privacy in mind was not important for the developers in the beginning. The trend to use mobile applications for communication has grown and become a standard method of communication between people. In consequence, we make 12 recommendations for improvement of either security, privacy, or usability, suitable for one or more of the tested applications. The results of our experiments demonstrate that the applications vary in terms of the usability and security properties they provide, and none of them are perfect. During these experiments, we test 21 security and usability properties specially relevant for applications (not protocols). We conduct five types of experiments on each of the six applications using the same hardware setup. In this survey, we compare six existing applications for end-to-end encrypted instant messaging, namely, Signal, WhatsApp, Wire, Viber, Riot, and Telegram, most of them implementing one of the recent and popular protocols called Signal. New implementations of such end-to-end encrypted messaging protocols have appeared, and several popular chat applications have been updated to use such protocols. As a consequence of these revelations, developers have begun releasing new protocols for end-to-end encrypted conversations, extending and making popular the old Off-the-Record protocol. In recent years, it has come to attention that governments have been doing mass surveillance of personal communications without the consent of the citizens.
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