Security design for Instant Messaging system based on RSA and triple DES

The technology of instant messaging (IM) is becoming an important means of communication nowadays. However, some inherit security weaknesses have been recognized as a serious barrier for IM building up its position as an Internet key application. This paper presents a security design for IM on the basis of comparison between the RSA algorithm and the 3DES algorithm that satisfy the requirements at both the security level and computational speed.