Privacy-aware presence management in instant messaging systems
Karsten Loesing, Markus Dorsch, Martin Grote, Knut Hildebrandt, Maximilian Röglinger, Matthias Sehr, Christian D. Wilms, Guido Wirtz · 2006
Information about online presence allows partici-pants of instant messaging (IM) systems to determine whether their prospective communication partners will be able to answer their requests in a timely manner, or not. This makes IM more personal and closer than other forms of communication such as e-mail. On the other hand, revelation of presence constitutes a poten-tial of misuse by untrustworthy entities, e.g. generation of presence logs. We argue that current IM systems do not take reasonable precautions to protect presence in-formation. We propose an IM system designed to be robust against attacks to disclose a user’s presence. It stores presence information in a distributed hash table (DHT) in a way that is only detectable and applicable for intended users and even not comprehensible for the DHT nodes. We apply an anonymous communication network to protect the users ’ physical addresses. 1.