MARSHAL

Secure messaging applications are deployed on devices that can be compromised, lost, stolen, or corrupted in many ways. Thus, recovering from attacks to get back to a clean state is essential and known as healing. Signal is a widely-known, privacy-friendly messaging application, that uses key-ratcheting mechanism updates keys at each stage to provide end-to-end channel security, forward secrecy, and post-compromise security. We strengthen this last property, by providing a faster healing. Signal needs up to two full chains of messages before recovering, our protocol enables recovery after the equivalent of a chain of only one message. We also provide an extra protection against session-hijacking attacks. We do so, while building on the pre-existing Signal backbone, without weakening its other security assumptions, and still being compatible with Signal's out-of-order message handling feature. Our implementation results show that, while slower than Signal (as expected), MARSHAL's spectacular gain in healing speed comes at a surprisingly low cost, with individual stages (including key-derivation, encryption, and decryption) taking less than 6 ms.