Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Computer and Information Science (MCIS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Remzi Seker, Ph.D.

Abstract

This thesis proposes a solution into the implementation of on-line chat-room environments that ensures the privacy protection of such services and provides an off-the-record feature. Instant Messaging (IM) is becoming an integral part of social as well as business life. The main concern with IM systems is that the information being transmitted is easily accessible. Some protection could be achieved with the use of a secure tunneling (i.e. VPN etc.). Nevertheless, even the use of VPN-like technologies does not provide end-to-end secrecy. Off-the-record (OTR), designed by Borisov. N et al. is a protocol which enables IM users to have private conversations over the insecure public Internet by placing additional security layers. However, the OTR protocol currently does not support multi-user chat rooms via various popular IM services and there is such a need, a product, which provides users the opportunity to meet in an IM-based, virtual, and encrypted environment. This project implements an extension of the two-party OTR protocol, named Group OTR-GOTR. GOTR protocol enables users to have a free and secure multi-user communication environment with no proprietary software requirement. The case study in this thesis describes a proof of concept GOTR plug-in developed for the Pidgin platform. Such a product is believed to be beneficial to open source project teams as well as small businesses to keep their privacy and their competitiveness.

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