MessageGuard: A Browser-based Platform for Usable, Content-Based Encryption Research

Abstract

This paper describes MessageGuard, a browser-based platform for research into usable content-based encryption. MessageGuard is designed to enable collaboration between security and usability researchers on long-standing research questions in this area. It significantly simplifies the effort required to work in this space and provides a place for research results to be shared, replicated, and compared with minimal confounding factors. MessageGuard provides ubiquitous encryption and secure cryptographic operations, enabling research on any existing web application, with realistic usability studies on a secure platform. We validate MessageGuard's compatibility and performance, and we illustrate its utility with case studies for Gmail and Facebook Chat. 1. Substantial modifications are needed because existing open source content-based encryption tools are unusable [16]. 2. A diff-based patch of MessageGuard's code base.