The Snowden Phone: A Comparative Survey of Secure Instant Messaging Mobile Applications

In recent years, it has come to attention that governments have been doing mass surveillance of personal communications without the consent citizens. As a consequence these revelations, developers begun releasing new protocols for end-to-end encrypted conversations, extending and making popular old Off-the-Record protocol. New implementations such messaging appeared, several chat applications updated use protocols. this survey, we compare six existing instant messaging, namely, Signal, WhatsApp, Wire, Viber, Riot, Telegram, most them implementing one called Signal. We conduct five types experiments on each using same hardware setup. During experiments, test 21 security usability properties specially relevant (not protocols). The results our demonstrate vary in terms they provide, none are perfect. consequence, make 12 recommendations improvement either security, privacy, or usability, suitable more tested applications.