Prototype development for secure public instant messaging (IM) at work

Instant Messaging (IM) services over the last few years have evolved from a casual communication tool to a formal business communication tool. Security requirements change drastically when instant messaging systems are employed in the corporate world as sensitive data needs to be transmitted. Many security enhancements have been proposed for instant messaging from the perspective of peer-to-peer talk. In this paper, we study the extension of secure instant messaging for group settings. We also propose a scheme, IBECRT, which uses ID-based encryption and the Chinese Remainder Theorem. The scheme does not require a central trusted entity for key distribution and achieves uniform work-load distribution. Additionally, the protocol has the following properties: hiding the users’ identity in a conference, authentication of senders, and integrity protection of the messages exchanged.

The spread of instant messenger systems provides an excellent opportunity and a helpful tool to healthcare professionals. WhatsApp instant messenger use is widely prevalent among health professionals, cancer patients, caregivers and the general population. It is a quick and easy communication tool that may also be used on personal computers and business purposes. WhatsApp instant messenger and other similar tools may be a very useful complement for e-medicine. Instant messaging systems may be helpful, especially in rural areas, in medium- or low-income countries, or to avoid unnecessary travels, improve knowledge and awareness of cancer, monitor home care and support the delivery of home care. The unregulated use of WhatsApp instant messenger requires sound and shared guidelines to assure impeccable professional service. Although a significant number of papers have investigated the roles of social networks in connecting patients to health professionals, there is still a lack of information and scientific data about their uses, benefits and limitations in connecting health providers only for professional communication. The role of instant messenger systems in cancer practice and research needs to be clarified. In this paper, we report a focus on available data, pros and contras of the unregulated use of WhatsApp instant messaging, in the context of e-medicine, as an interprofessional and doctor/patient communication tool in oncology.

Nowadays instant messaging (IM), as a viable communication tool, has been widely adopted in the business field. Instant messaging delivers lots of benefits for business, but most people are unaware of its security problems and other potential implications. This paper focuses on investigating the problems and issues associated with the instant messaging in business. The existing literature is critically analyzed to represent the background, concept and relevant techniques of instant messaging related to the topic. Finally a model of Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) is proposed especially for small enterprises.

Interpersonal awareness is one person's up-to-the moment knowledge about other group members, while artifact awareness is one person's up-to-the-moment knowledge about other group members' work artifacts; both contribute to fluid group coordination and interaction. Many popular computer-mediated communication systems focus on interpersonal awareness, with artifact awareness being a second-class citizen. To better support artifact awareness in this domain, we leverage the widespread adoption and technical robustness of an unaltered, commercial instant messaging (IM) system. Our main contribution is to treat an artifact, such as a document, as a first-class instant messaging "buddy." Our system, Artifact Buddy, gives each shared artifact an interactive presence on IM, providing awareness cues about its editing status and notifications when new versions are committed, enabling simple version control, and facilitating informal group communication. The group's interactions with and conversation around the artifact are also recorded as part of a persistent conversational history.

Currently, text communication cannot be used to ask for help in emergency situations. Even in the Next Generation 9-1-1 system, an IP/SIP-based emergency communication system, there has been no investigation into how text communications such as Instant Messaging (IM) and Short Message Service (SMS) can be integrated. We identify the technical challenges in the integration of IM and SMS networks with the NG9-1-1 system, and propose a solution for each challenge. We also describe a working prototype system using our approach.

‘Healthcare infrastructures’ is often associated with large, complex and costly technical solutions made available by institutions. The widespread use of smart devices made possible the development of information exchange building on general purpose communication technologies. Through the analysis of an expert opinion service for breast cancer via WhatsApp, we illustrate the process of setting up the service, the challenges and the ramifications of health information exchange taking place through non-institutional channels. We introduce the concept of ‘grassroot infrastructures’ to indicate socio-technical systems created and managed by lower-ranked organizational actors, invisible to rationalized representations of work.

Peer feedback has become a crucial element in the field of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) writing. There has been a notable scholarly interest in the integration of peer feedback in English writing instruction. Among Chinese undergraduate students, there is a growing tendency to use instant messaging systems, such as WeChat, for peer feedback. WeChat distinguishes itself from other platforms by its extensive usage in China, particularly owing to its user-friendly features. However, there is a lack of systematic research in the current literature to explore the effectiveness of using WeChat for peer feedback in English writing. In particular, there is a lack of research on five aspects of students’ English writing performance when using WeChat as a platform for peer feedback, such as content and idea, coherence and cohesion, grammar and form, word choice and vocabulary, and organization and structure. This article aims to provide an overview of the investigation of the effectiveness of using WeChat as an instant messaging platform through a literature review. The authors adhered to predetermined criteria for what literature were included and excluded. Ultimately, the authors reviewed a collection of 30 research articles from the year 2011 to 2023 that are directly related to the topic at hand. This review encompasses an evaluation of the research designs, findings, discussions, and gaps in research identified in these articles. This review offers a comprehensive comprehension of the present status of research in this field. Moreover, it emphasizes the need for additional academic investigation, specifically targeting the task of filling the recognized gaps in knowledge. Furthermore, the conclusion highlights the necessity of further studies, which needs to explore the long-term effects of incorporating WeChat and peer feedback on enhancing students’ writing performance. This encompasses various aspects, such as content and idea, coherence and cohesion, word choice and vocabulary, organization and structure, as well as grammar and form.

The integration of voice transmission into instant messaging systems may be a boon for most of us, but causes a problem for others, that is, this integration will disadvantage those who are deaf and hard of hearing. This problem may be mitigated with transcription implemented with automated speech recognition (ASR). This paper describes a plug-in for IBM's Sametime instant messaging product that uses commercial ASR products to provide transcription. The user interface and the lessons learned from the wide use of the plug-in are described.

We propose and study an evolving network model for instant messaging system (IMS) with local-world preferential connections and acquaintance introduction mechanisms, which exist in many physical complex networks especially in IMS evolving network. We put forward the algorithms to generate IMS evolving network model and through simulation results we talk about the topological properties of the IMS evolving network. First of all, degree distribution, clustering coefficient along with average path length are simulated and then the community structure of the model is analyzed. We can draw the conclusion that the degree distribution of IMS evolving network doesnpsilat obey power-law distribution, and this network has a short average path length and a high clustering coefficient. In a word, the simulation result shows that the IMS evolving network is a complex network possessing properties of small-world and clear community structure, but doesnpsilat have scale-free property.

Success in today's fast-paced global economy requires precision, agility, and speed. Organizations must quickly respond to changing market demands and make timely decisions that impact the success or failure of their business. Through the use of available and proven technologies to increase the velocity of collaborative decision making to match the speed of doing business, the demand for information is driving the need for real-time communications in today's organizations. Instant access to information across internal collaborative groups, important customers, and external trading partners creates business efficiencies and sets the real-time organization above the rest. However, rapid and often unmanaged real-time communications, such as instant messaging (IM) and Voice-over-IP (VoIP), pose grave information and network security risks. Industry analysts Radicati, IDC, and Gartner have all estimated that more than 200 million people, across organizations of all sizes, engage in IM for business and non-business use while at work. Although some companies have policies defining authorized and unauthorized use of IM, most organizations lack the most basic security and management controls. This article explores the underpinnings of the security threats posed by the growing use of unmanaged IM in the enterprise. It also examines the components of a holistic strategy for protecting enterprises against the emerging IM security threat.

Short message service has been growing tremendously in the last few years. Meanwhile, instant messaging service has been getting more and more popular, too. To bridge them is becoming a new promising niche because people really enjoy getting messages instantly, anywhere at any time. However, there is still not a common, unified and open standard to communicate with each other. Big instant message providers, such as AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ dominate Internet instant message systems via proprietary protocols. Although, major handset manufactures, e.g., Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia, formed the Wireless Village Initiative to ensure interoperability of instant message service particularly; it requires buying their new handsets to support. However, people don't change handsets often. On the other hand, every carrier operator has been trying to refine its own homemade interface to short message application services with the intention to cover the complexity and security of the communication with its own short message service center. Hence, in this paper we propose an infrastructure, based on the XML-based protocol, XMPP, not only to simplify interconnections among Internet instant message systems and short message systems, but also to support legacy handsets for instant message service. Besides, most operators' short message service centers do not guarantee delivery in order. Therefore, we are also going to introduce a mechanism inside our servers in order to make in-order delivery sensitive services applicable on top of this infrastructure.

Informal interaction has proven to be useful in supporting collaboration in office and educational environments. Online courses, however, provide limited opportunities for informal interaction, which might put them at a disadvantage when compared with traditional courses. This lack of opportunities could obstruct collaboration among students, a key aspect for successful instruction. To provide students with opportunities for informal interaction, we designed and developed a system named CENTERS. It is an instant messaging and presence awareness system that supports lightweight communications within the group. CENTERS provides awareness of the presence of members of the distributed community and allows them to interact easily and navigate together through the course’s materials, share insights, resolve doubts, and collaborate in course related activities. To evaluate the use of CENTERS in an online learning environment, a study was designed to assess interaction from a socio-academic perspective. Results showed that CENTERS helped reduce the students’ feelings of isolation and facilitated a greater degree of interpersonal interaction within the course participants.

Topic detection in group chat has become a promising research due to the widely usage of Instant Messaging (IM) systems. Previous works mainly focus on improving the text similarity between two related messages by utilizing different weighting factors. However, the text similarity of related texts is likely to be zero (or near zero) due to the characteristics of short text messages in group chat. To solve this problem, an innovative topic detection method based on implicit reply which indicates chat messages interact with each other is proposed in this paper. The comparative experiments results on the datasets gathered from QQ groups demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method as compared to the baseline approaches.

In recent years, China's Internet industry maintains a faster growth state, in which Instant Messaging Services has become the top utilization rate of Internet applications. This paper makes empirical study on network enterprise Instant Messaging Services, taking the fast developing Internet Instant Messaging as research background, the correlation between Instant Messaging Services Quality and enterprise Customer Loyalty as research purpose, network Instant Messaging users as research object. The research process mainly has three parts. First, this paper selects initial data through questionnaire. Then it extracts the factors of related items to Instant Messaging Services Quality based on data validity testing, ensures the study hypothesis on the extracted main factors using Correlation Analysis and constructs the study model. Finally, based on previous successful work, it applies regression analysis to test the hypothesis and reaches the conclusion which can provide some managerial inspirations.

Abstract—In most regards, the twenty-first century may not bring revolutionary changes in electronic messaging technology in terms of applications or protocols. Security issues that have long been a concern in messaging application are finally being solved using a variety of products. Web-based messaging systems are rapidly evolving the text-based conversation. The users have the right to protect their privacy from the eavesdropper, or other parties which interferes the privacy of the users for such purpose. The chatters most probably use the instant messages to chat with others for personal issue; in which no one has the right eavesdrop the conversation channel and interfere this privacy. This is considered as a non-ethical manner and the privacy of the users should be protected. The author seeks to identify the security features for most public instant messaging services used over the internet and suggest some solutions in order to encrypt the instant messaging over the conversation channel. The aim of this research is to investigate through forensics and sniffing techniques, the possibilities of hiding communication using encryption to protect the integrity of messages exchanged. Authors used different tools and methods to run the investigations. Such tools include Wireshark packet sniffer, Forensics Tool Kit (FTK) and viaForensic mobile forensic toolkit. Finally, authors will report their findings on the level of security that encryption could provide to instant messaging services.