Donnerstag, 3. Juli 2008

How (un)safe is instant messaging?

Due to the recent ICQ changes which affected older ICQ clients and prevented them from joining the ICQ network, I found a nice survey about IM security in general. How safe are the different protocols? Why does the "Facebook chat" for instance totally suck?

These and more questions are answered in a nice posting by Declan McCullagh.

4 Kommentare:

xaitax hat gesagt…

Who still refuses to use jabber/xmpp blames himself. so no more arguments for me needed.

Dominik Birk hat gesagt…

I agree but what about the "transports" issue in Jabber? I mean, users need "usability" ...

Perhaps can bring in some arguments about Jabber/XMPP :D

fippo hat gesagt…

oh yeah... hail jabber. It's so secure. Pidgin refuses to work with servers that require TLS with strong algorithms. Most servers, including the ccc server don't use ephemeral TLS handshakes. Most servers don't care about the certificate a remote server shows, whether expired, revoked, signed by evil CA or else.

transports... mh... py-icqt had a serious bug which leaked certain messages to a remote attacker...

jabber-e2e... hm... maybe XTLS, the third approach to e2e will work. Just wait for another ten years so it will be implemented. Or maybe it is again a spec written for selling some companys products.

Dominik Birk hat gesagt…

Thx Fippo ... it's interesting to hear some of these facts from guys who know more about this kind of topic than normal users like me.