OMEMO

In today's world, OMEMO has become a topic of great relevance and interest to a large number of people. Since its discovery until today, OMEMO has been the subject of multiple studies, debates and scientific advances that have contributed to expanding our knowledge on this topic. In this article, we will explore different aspects related to OMEMO, analyzing its impact on society, its evolution over time, and the possible implications it has for the future. Through a multidisciplinary perspective, we will seek to understand in depth everything that OMEMO has to offer, and how its influence extends to different areas of our daily lives.

Logo of OMEMO

OMEMO is an extension to the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for multi-client end-to-end encryption developed by Andreas Straub. According to Straub, OMEMO uses the Double Ratchet Algorithm "to provide multi-end to multi-end encryption, allowing messages to be synchronized securely across multiple clients, even if some of them are offline".[1] The name "OMEMO" is a recursive acronym for "OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption". It is an open standard based on the Double Ratchet Algorithm and the Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP, XEP-0163).[2] OMEMO offers future and forward secrecy and deniability with message synchronization and offline delivery.

Features

In comparison with OTR, the OMEMO protocol offers many-to-many encrypted chat, offline messages queuing, forward secrecy, file transfer, verifiability and deniability at the cost of slightly larger message size overhead.[3]

History

The protocol was developed and first implemented by Andreas Straub as a Google Summer of Code project in 2015. The project's goal was to implement a double-ratchet-based multi-end to multi-end encryption scheme into an Android XMPP-based instant messaging client called Conversations. It was introduced in Conversations and submitted to the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) as a proposed XMPP Extension Protocol (XEP) in the autumn of 2015 and got accepted as XEP-0384 in December 2016.[1]

In July 2016, the ChatSecure project announced that they would implement OMEMO in the next releases. ChatSecure v4.0 supports OMEMO and was released on January 17, 2017.[4][5]

A first experimental release of an OMEMO plugin for the cross-platform XMPP client Gajim was made available on December 26, 2015.[6]

In June 2016, the non-profit computer security consultancy firm Radically Open Security published an analysis of the OMEMO protocol.[7]

Client support

Selected clients supporting OMEMO (full list of clients also exists[8]):

Library support

  • Smack supports OMEMO using the two modules smack-omemo and smack-omemo-signal[23]
  • XMPPFramework (macOS, iOS, tvOS) [24] supports OMEMO via the OMEMOModule extension [25] when used in conjunction with the SignalProtocol-ObjC library.[26]

References

  1. ^ a b " NEW: XEP-0384 (OMEMO Encryption)". December 7, 2016. Retrieved December 23, 2016.
  2. ^ Daniel Gultsch. "OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption". Retrieved November 23, 2015.
  3. ^ "OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption". conversations.im. Retrieved January 22, 2019.
  4. ^ "ChatSecure iOS v3.2.3 - XMPP Push". July 25, 2016. Retrieved September 7, 2016.
  5. ^ "ChatSecure v4.0 - OMEMO and Signal Protocol". January 17, 2017. Retrieved February 7, 2017.
  6. ^ Bahtiar Gadimov (December 26, 2015). "Initial OMEMO commit". dev.gajim.org. Retrieved September 8, 2017.
  7. ^ Radically Open Security (June 1, 2016). "OMEMO: Cryptographic Analysis Report" (PDF). Amsterdam: Radically Open Security. Archived (PDF) from the original on April 4, 2025. Retrieved April 10, 2025.
  8. ^ "Are we OMEMO yet?". Are we OMEMO yet?. Retrieved January 22, 2019.
  9. ^ "Beagle OMEMO support". July 7, 2019.
  10. ^ "ChatSecure v4.0 - OMEMO and Signal Protocol". chatsecure.org. January 17, 2017. Retrieved January 17, 2017.
  11. ^ "XEP-0384: OMEMO Encryption · Issue #497 · conversejs/converse.js". GitHub. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  12. ^ "Dino - Modern Jabber/XMPP Client using GTK+/Vala". dino.im. Retrieved November 6, 2017.
  13. ^ Bahtiar Gadimov; et al. "Omemogajimplugin · Wiki · gajim / gajim-plugins · GitLab". Retrieved December 4, 2016.
  14. ^ Developers, Gajim. "Gajim 1.8.0". Gajim. Retrieved June 15, 2023.
  15. ^ "Kaidan 0.9: End-to-End Encryption & XMPP Providers". Kaidan. May 5, 2023. Retrieved October 20, 2023.
  16. ^ "End to end encryption in Movim - OMEMO is (finally) there!". mov.im. Retrieved December 15, 2021.
  17. ^ Vyacheslav Karpukhin. "OMEMO for Psi · GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  18. ^ Vyacheslav Karpukhin. "Psi+ snapshots". GitHub. Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  19. ^ Richard Bayerle. "lurch - OMEMO for libpurple". GitHub. Retrieved February 12, 2017.
  20. ^ Olivier Mehani. "Lurch4Adium - OMEMO Xtra for Adium". GitHub. Retrieved June 8, 2017.
  21. ^ René Calles. "profanity-omemo-plugin: A Python plugin to use (axolotl / Signal Protocol) encryption for the profanity XMPP messenger". GitHub. Retrieved January 10, 2017.
  22. ^ "BeagleIM and SiskinIM just got OMEMO support". tigase.net. Retrieved June 7, 2019.
  23. ^ Schaub, Paul (June 6, 2017). "Ignite Realtime Blog: Smack v4.2 Introduces OME... | Ignite Realtime". community.igniterealtime.org. Retrieved July 11, 2017.
  24. ^ "Robbiehanson/XMPPFramework". GitHub. October 26, 2021.
  25. ^ "Robbiehanson/XMPPFramework". GitHub. October 26, 2021.
  26. ^ "SignalProtocolObjC". GitHub. January 30, 2021.