Alice and Bob, who the FOCI are they?: Analysis of end-to-end encryption in the LINE messaging application

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Presented at FOCI 2017 by

Jedidiah Crandall

Masashi Crete-nishihata

Andrew Hilts

Antonio Espinoza

William Tolley

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is becoming a standard feature in many popular chat apps, but independent security assessments of these implementations are limited. In this paper we provide the first independent analysis of E2EE features in LINE, a messaging application popular in Asian markets, and identify a replay attack and an attack on a lack of forward secrecy. Based on our analysis and communications with LINE about the vulnerabilities we discuss challenges and new research directions to better bridge vendors, researchers, and end-users around security issues.