Honey chatting: A novel instant messaging system robust to eavesdropping over communication

Abstract

There have been many efforts to strengthen security of Instant Messaging (IM) system. One of the typical technologies is the conventional message encryption using a secret or private key. However, the key is fundamentally vulnerable to a bruteforce attack, causing to acquire the original message. In this respect, a countermeasure was suggested as the way to generating plausible-looking but fake plaintexts, which is called Honey Encryption (HE). In this paper, we present a HE-based statistical scheme and design a Honey Chatting application, which is robust to eavesdropping. Besides, we verify the effectiveness of the Honey Chatting by comparing the entropy of decrypted messages through experiments.

A Cognitive Deception Model for Generating Fake Documents to Curb Data Exfiltration in Networks During Cyber-Attacks

“…The Levenshtein distance between the number of bit changes in the plaintext data and the decoy message of the CDM is compared with Yoon et al [33], Kim and Yoon [44] and Beaunardeau et al [45] as depicted in Table 4. The following related works were selected because they use similar dataset.…”

Cyber Deception for Computer and Network Security: Survey and Challenges

“…By adopting the honey encryption scheme, the defender can defeat brute-force attackers when they try to guess keys randomly. A recent application called Honey Chatting has been proposed in [36] to combat eavesdropping attacks by applying honey encryption to chatting applications. Honey encryption ensures that an attacker will not be able to verify if a right key is used to decrypt a chatting message thus cannot determine the exact content of the message.…”

Securing Instant Messages With Hardware-Based Cryptography and Authentication in Browser Extension

“…Others have acknowledged the importance of cryptography in communication. According to Kim and Yoon [25], some cryptosystems used in IM are vulnerable to brute-force attacks, specially those with short keys, or that are based in passwords, as users' choices are commonly weak. To overcome this problem, the authors propose a Honey Encryption system for use in Instant Messaging, in which inputting the wrong key will give a plausible, yet incorrect, plaintext.…”