The Security Analysis of Popular Instant Messaging Applications

Instant messaging applications on the smartphone platform have been prevalent in our communication with each other over the past few years. Meanwhile, people pay more and more attention to conversation security and personal privacy. In this paper, we present a comprehensive security analysis of three representative instant messengers including WeChat, WhatsApp and Telegram. We explicitly demonstrate their air interface communication protocols and the underlying security mechanisms. Furthermore, the encryption principles in local storage of chat records are also analyzed particularly. Besides, we exploit that personal metadata of communication participants will be collected by these instant messaging applications. These metadata closely relevant to personal privacy are almost disregarded in the previous research.