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 brute-force 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.