Abstract

The recent popularity growth of instant messengers made them the main communication and content distribution media for a huge number of people. However, a consequence of such popularity is user freedom and security. Majority of today’s popular messengers are prone to security and anonymity issues due to their centralized nature complemented by the requirement to disclose their phone number and contact book, because it’s been used for user identification.

This paper presents Tingl, an open-source secure messaging and content distribution application which uses a distributed network of servers and an onion routing protocol to send end-to-end encrypted messages with minimal exposure of user metadata.