ShareIff: A Sticky Policy Middleware for Self-Destructing Messages in Android Applications

Self-destructing messaging applications have garnered immense popularity due to the arrival of Snapchat. However, Snapchat's history has shown that building such services on modern mobile platforms is very challenging. In fact, either caused by programming errors or due to the limitations of existing mobile operating systems, in Snapchat and other similar applications it is possible to recover supposedly deleted messages against the senders' expectations, therefore leaving millions of users potentially vulnerable to privacy breaches. This paper presents ShareIff, a middleware for Android that provides an API for secure sharing and display of self-destructing messages. Using this middleware, Snapchat or any similar application, is able to encrypt the message on the sender's endpoint and send it to the recipient such that the message can be decrypted and securely displayed only on the recipient's device for the amount of time specified by the sender. ShareIff provides this property by relying on specialized cryptographic protocols and operating system mechanisms. ShareIff offers application developers a simple programming abstraction and adds marginal overheads to system and app.