Enhancing security in instant messaging systems with a hybrid SM2, SM3, and SM4 encryption framework

作者：He-Jun Lu, Roben A. Juanatas, Mideth Abisado · 发表于：PLoS ONE · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1371/journal.pone.0332665 · 被引用次数：2 · 研究领域：Cryptographic Implementations and Security、Advanced Authentication Protocols Security、Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption

With the rapid integration of instant messaging systems (IMS) into critical domains such as finance, public services, and enterprise operations, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of communication data has become a pressing concern. Existing IMS security solutions commonly employ traditional public-key cryptography, centralized authentication servers, or single-layer encryption, each of which is susceptible to single-point failures and provides only limited resistance against sophisticated attacks. This study addresses the research gap regarding the complementary advantages of SM2, SM3, and SM4 algorithms, as well as hybrid collaborative security schemes in IMS security. This paper presents a hybrid encryption security framework that combines the SM2, SM3, and SM4 algorithms to address emerging threats in IMS. The proposed framework adopts a decentralized architecture with certificateless authentication and performs all encryption and decryption operations on the client side, eliminating reliance on centralized servers and mitigating single-point failure risks. It further enforces an encrypt-before-store policy to enhance data security at the storage layer. The framework integrates SM2 for key exchange and authentication, SM4 for message encryption, and SM3 for integrity verification, forming a multi-layer defense mechanism capable of countering Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks, credential theft, database intrusions, and other vulnerabilities. Experimen...