Multi-party and distributed private messaging

Abstract

In this thesis, I extend private messaging systems by designing multi-party private messaging models and contribute to the implementation of a distributed private messaging system. Private communication is of increasing interest yet current state-of-the- art adopted solutions are inadequate in providing both scale and privacy. Most current communication methods leak metadata or are susceptible to traffic analysis in spite of end-to-end encryption. Vuvuzela is a foundational private messaging system helps reconcile these two concerns. This project builds on Vuvuzela by introducing three group messaging models. These models tradeoff support for multi-party messaging with network bandwidth and latency. Additionally, this work describes the implementation and evaluation of key aspects of a distributed private messaging system, Stadium. This new system scales to more users while keeping server costs down to promote the adoption of private messaging as a more feasible practice. Keywords. Privacy, Deniability, Messaging, Multi-party, Distributed Systems.