Introducing Talek: A Private Group Messaging System with Hidden Access Patterns

guest · Feb 13, 2020

Introducing Talek: A private messaging system
Private group messaging with hidden access patterns
February 12, 2020
https://www.techexplorist.com/introducing-talek-private-messaging-system/30015/

For anything you wouldn’t want to be seen by your ISP or used against you in a court of law, end-to-end encryption is necessary. Encrypted messaging services work by giving every user of an app a public key and a private key.

To ensure even greater security, scientists from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a new messaging system called Talek. This unique messenger hides both the content of messages and general patterns of communication between users, including their identity.
To achieve its security goals without coordination between clients, Talek relies on the information-theoretic private information retrieval (PIR) technique.

Raymond Cheng, one of the researchers who carried out the study, said, “More and more of our communications online are encrypted, which makes it harder for adversaries to see the contents of what we say. Talek takes this a step further, making it harder for those same adversaries to learn who is talking with whom.”
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A key advantage of Talek is that while acknowledging it might be computationally costly, it very well may be done proficiently on GPUs. Likewise, its novel structure permits clients to shroud both ongoing conversations and their communication patterns.

Additional features of the messaging system include:

Users can then store the messages they write to others according to this sequence of addresses. Those receiving the messages, on the other hand, can read them privately and securely using PIR.

It allows users to learn when their private logs and conversations have new messages without polling.

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Talek: Private Group Messaging with Hidden Access Patterns
(PDF - 1.37 MB): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08250

Talek is a private group messaging system that sends messages through potentially untrustworthy servers, while hiding both data content and the communication patterns among its users.

Talek explores a new point in the design space of private messaging; it guarantees access sequence indistinguishability, which is among the strongest guarantees in the space, while assuming an anytrust threat model, which is only slightly weaker than the strongest threat model currently found in related work.
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mirimir · Feb 13, 2020

Papers like this appear, from time to time, but very few have been implemented at scale.

But hey, the code is at https://github.com/privacylab/talek

Anyone wanna play?

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