(In-)Secure messaging with the Silent Circle instant messaging protocol Sebastian R. Verschoor Tanja Lange David R. Chariton School of Computer Science Department of Mathematics and Computer and Institute for Quantum Computing, Science, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven University of Waterloo
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1.1 History of SCimp Silent Text, the instant messaging application by the com- Silent Text uses XMPP for transportation and adds a pany Silent Circle, provides its users with end-to-end en- crypto layer to generate shared keys between communicating crypted communication on the Blackphone and other smart- parties. Messages are passed (and temporarily stored if nec- phones. The underlying protocol, SCimp, has received many essary) by Silent Circle's server. Instead of deploying OTR, extensions during the update to version 2, but has not been the Off-The-Record protocol [6] by Borisov, Goldberg and subjected to critical review from the cryptographic commu- Brewer, Silent Circle started from SecureSMS, introduced nity. In this paper, we analyze both the design and imple- in Belvin's masters' thesis [3], and adapted it to the XMPP mentation of SCimp by inspection of the documentation (to setting. The resulting protocol by Moscaritolo, Belvin, and the extent it exists) and code. Many of the security prop- Zimmermann from 2012 is called SCimp: \Silent Circle in- erties of SCimp version 1 are found to be secure, however stant messaging protocol". SCimp is described on Silent Cir- many of the extensions contain vulnerabilities and the im- cle's web page [24] and in a white paper [21]; some source plementation contains bugs that affect the overall security.