Question: Project Proposal: Creating a Secure Messaging App
Introduction: In today's age, a person's privacy has become more and more of a concern. While there are a lot of messaging applications on the Android and iOS marketplaces, security exploits are found more and more on these messengers (Greenburg, 2018). Social media messengers are not secure either (Segarra, 2017). So, what can be done about this?
Creating a secure messaging app from scratch using all the principles learned from the mistakes of current products by emphasizing security as its most prominent feature is what shall be described in this project. An application creation process will be detailed in every step on how the project should progress and what the desired end product would look like.
Statement of need: People need a secure means of communicating with each other than guarantees their privacy. Normal communications between friends all the way up to hospital communications between doctors about consultations all deserve the right of privacy. There needs to be a mobile application that can be created to enable this private communication that is both functional and completely secure.
Project Definition: A detailed plan for designing a mobile app will be presented in this project. The stakeholders, infrastructure, guidelines, privacy policy, and governmental laws will all be detailed that deal with secure communications. The application will be designed with security in mind and will contain end-to-end encryption through a VPN to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Encryption of all aspects of the program will be implemented using validated cryptography to ensure nothing on the device could be stolen within memory or on the storage space of the mobile device by other malicious programs. Each step of this development will be detailed using the Prototyping Development Model.
High Level Approach: Each part of the development of the application will need a prototype. These prototypes will be merged and altered with customer feedback and testing results to create the final product. Some of the prototypes required will be: End-to-end test API, VPN API, iOS App Interface, Android Interface, Security encryption modules of process data, and others. Each of these prototypes will be reviewed by customers and security researchers and hackers to create an application that can truly be called private.