SendingNetwork: Advancing the Future of Decentralized Messaging Networks

In the evolving landscape of Internet technologies, where decentralized systems, especially blockchain-based computation and storage like Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Arweave, and IPFS, are gaining prominence, there remains a stark absence of a holistic decentralized communication framework. This gap underlines the pressing necessity for a protocol that not only enables seamless cross-platform messaging but also allows direct messaging to wallet addresses, fostering interoperability and privacy across diverse platforms. SendingNetwork addresses this need by creating a reliable and secure decentralized communication network, targeting essential challenges like privacy protection, scalability, efficiency, and composability. Central to our approach is the incorporation of edge computing to form an adaptive relay network with the modular libp2p library. We introduce a dynamic group chat encryption mechanism based on the Double Ratchet algorithm for secure communication and propose a Delegation scheme for efficient message processing in large group chats, enhancing both resilience and scalability. Our theoretical analyses affirm the Delegation scheme's superior performance. To bolster system stability and encourage node participation, we integrate two innovative consensus mechanisms: "Proof of Relay" for validating message relay workload based on the novel KZG commitment, and "Proof of Availability" for ensuring network consistency and managing incentives through Verkle trees. Our whitepaper details the network's key components and architecture, concluding with a roadmap and a preview of future enhancements to SendingNetwork

End-to-End Encrypted Group Messaging with Insider Security

Our society has become heavily dependent on electronic communication, and preserving the integrity of this communication has never been more important. Cryptography is a tool that can help to protect the security and privacy of these communications. Secure messaging protocols like OTR and Signal typically employ end-to-end encryption technology to mitigate some of the most egregious adversarial attacks, such as mass surveillance. However, the secure messaging protocols deployed today suffer from two major omissions: they do not natively support group conversations with three or more participants, and they do not fully defend against participants that behave maliciously. Secure messaging tools typically implement group conversations by establishing pairwise instances of a two-party secure messaging protocol, which limits their scalability and makes them vulnerable to insider attacks by malicious members of the group. Insiders can often perform attacks such as rendering the group permanently unusable, causing the state of the group to diverge for the other participants, or covertly remaining in the group after appearing to leave. It is increasingly important to prevent these insider attacks as group conversations become larger, because there are more potentially malicious participants. This dissertation introduces several new protocols that can be used to build modern communication tools with strong security and privacy properties, including resistance to insider attacks. Firstly, the dissertation addresses a weakness in current two-party secure messaging tools: malicious participants can leak portions of a conversation alongside cryptographic proof of authorship, undermining confidentiality. The dissertation introduces two new authenticated key exchange protocols, DAKEZ and XZDH, with deniability properties that can prevent this type of attack when integrated into a secure messaging protocol. DAKEZ provides strong deniability in interactive settings such as instant messaging, while XZDH provides deniability for non-interactive settings such as mobile messaging. These protocols are accompanied by composable security proofs. Secondly, the dissertation introduces Safehouse, a new protocol that can be used to implement secure group messaging tools for a wide range of applications. Safehouse solves the difficult cryptographic problems at the core of secure group messaging protocol design: it securely establishes and manages a shared encryption key for the group and ephemeral signing keys for the participants. These keys can be used to build chat rooms, team communication servers, video conferencing tools, and more. Safehouse enables a server to detect and reject protocol deviations, while still providing end-to-end encryption. This allows an honest server to completely prevent insider attacks launched by malicious participants. A malicious server can still perform a denial-of-service attack that renders the group unavailable or "forks" the group into subgroups that can never communicate again, but other attacks are prevented, even if the server colludes with a malicious participant. In particular, an adversary controlling the server and one or more participants cannot cause honest participants' group states to diverge (even in subtle ways) without also permanently preventing them from communicating, nor can the adversary arrange to covertly remain in the group after all of the malicious participants under its control are removed from the group. Safehouse supports non-interactive communication, dynamic group membership, mass membership changes, an invitation system, and secure property storage, while offering a variety of configurable security properties including forward secrecy, post-compromise security, long-term identity authentication, strong deniability, and anonymity preservation. The dissertation includes a complete proof-of-concept implementation of Safehouse and a sample application with a graphical client. Two sub-protocols of independent interest are also introduced: a new cryptographic primitive that can encrypt multiple private keys to several sets of recipients in a publicly verifiable and repeatable manner, and a round-efficient interactive group key exchange protocol that can instantiate multiple shared key pairs with a configurable knowledge relationship

Puncturable Proxy Re-Encryption Supporting to Group Messaging Service

This work envisions a new encryption primitive for many-to-many paradigms such as group messaging systems. Previously, puncturable encryption (PE) was introduced to provide forward security for asynchronous messaging services. However, existing PE schemes were proposed only for one-to-one communication, and causes a significant overhead for a group messaging system. In fact, the group communication over PE can only be achieved by encrypting a message multiple times for each receiver by the sender’s device, which is usually suitable to restricted resources such as mobile phones or sensor devices. Our new suggested scheme enables to re-encrypt ciphertexts of puncturable encryption by a message server (i.e., a proxy) so that computationally heavy operations are delegated to the server who has more powerful processors and a constant power source. We then proposed a new Puncturable Proxy Re-Encryption (PPRE) scheme. The scheme is inspired by unidirectional proxy re-encryption (UPRE), which achieves forward secrecy through fine-grained revocation of decryption capability by integrating the PE scheme. This paper first presents a forward secure PPRE in the group messaging service. Our scheme is IND-CCA secure under 3-weak Decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Inversion assumption