End-to-end encrypted peer to peer chat system with SSI

Abstract

Chat applications are among the most popular Internet applications and a huge number of people use them on a regular basis. As their use has grown, different security and privacy concerns have received attention from the users and the professionals. Many users consider what they chat with their family and friends to be extremely private and they want a certain amount of assurance that their chats are securely exchanged and are not exposed to any unauthorized parties. Towards this aim, many chat applications employ an End-to-End (E2E) Encryption mechanism. This is to safeguard the encryption keys during key exchange as these keys are crucial to ensure the security of the chat histories. Unfortunately, the existing key exchange mechanisms for E2E encryption are prone to Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks. In addition, such mechanisms sometimes use a central server for exchanging keys which raises privacy and security concerns as these central servers may not be trustworthy. In this research, we would like to address these issues, by introducing a novel SSI (Self-sovereign Identity) based End-to-End Chat System which supports a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) key exchange mechanism.