Revision as of 03:31, 11 September 2015

Solution- Surveillance

A secure chat involves confidentiality between the conversing parties - no one else can read the transcript. It should also include authenticity - whereby all parties can be confident of who they are chatting with. Theses properties are achieved through end-to-end encryption and key verification. The chat record is not accessible to the service provider (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook do not offer these services in their chat programs). Take a look at the Secure Messaging Scorecard from EFF to see how they rate various chat clients that claim security properties.

The standard for a secure two-party conversation is called OTR - Off the record messaging and several popular chat clients offer it, including Pidgin with OTR for Windows and Linux, Adium for Mac, Jitsi for all common desktop operating systems. The latter also includes secure audio and video conferencing. These clients work with your existing accounts on Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. and encrypt the conversation on the respective networks.

Several chat clients are available as an add-on to your web browser, including Cryptocat and Mega. Aside from that, several free messaging services offer similar encryption properties for messaging including Peerio and Telegram. All of the tools mentioned within are available as open source software and publicly disclose the encryption methods they employ in their software.

If you are interested in creating a secure and an anonymous conversation, please refer to I'd like to have an anonymous conversation

• Parent: Online Conversations /