Quarks: A Secure and Decentralized Blockchain-Based Messaging Network

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the popularity of messaging systems has increased both in enterprise and consumer level. Many of these systems used secure protocols like end-to-end encryption to ensure strong security features such as “future secrecy” for one-to-one communication. However, the majority of them rely on centralized servers owned by big IT companies, which allows them to use their users’ personal data. Also it allows the government to track and regulate their citizens’ activities, which poses significant threats to “digital freedom”. Also, these systems have failed to achieve security attributes like confidentiality, integrity, privacy, and future secrecy for group communications. In this paper, we present a novel blockchain-based secure messaging system named Quarks that overcomes the security pitfalls of the existing systems and eliminates the centralized control. We have analyzed our design of the system with security models and definitions from existing literature to demonstrate the system’s reliability and usability. We have developed a Proof of Concept (PoC) of the Quarks system leveraging Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), and conducted load testing on that. We noticed that our PoC system achieves all the desired attributes that are prevalent in a traditional centralized messaging scheme despite the limited capacity of the development and testing environment. Therefore, this assures us the applicability of such systems in near future if scaled up properly.