Shoutbox

Encryption is important. Take for instance Skype. It encrypts all messages you send and the voice with AES. Sometimes you want to encrypt your messages when chatting with your girlfirnd/boyfriend. Encryption will prevent eavesdroppers from reading your personal MSN Messenger conversations. If Messenger Plus could enable a button for encryption it would be great. I know there are  programs designated for only that porpose in MSN messesnger...but including encryption in Messenger Plus would make it so much easier.

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The only way someone will read your conversations is throught the log files, so encrypt them why don't you?

Well there other probes as hackers or something i think that feature wold be useful...for secret agents.

And the thing about the other contacts has to have msgplus also its not a probe if its your girlfriend or something, or if you really want to encrypt the message and the other part too there is no probe about installing msgplus.

I dont see the need of that because the logs can be encrypted and hackers... bah who wants to see the convo with your grilfriend?
And..the echelon well they dont care about that eheh.

Yah, like you know any hackers, so that would be a stupid feature.

It's so easy to eavesdrop people in MSN from another computer in the same network (behind the same firewall).

Just get WinPCap and Ngrep. Copy ngrep.exe to your Windows folder (for easier access), open up Command Prompt and type "ngrep port 1863" and voilà! You'll see even more information than MSN shows you.

You can see when people even open your (or your roommate's ) chat window, before they even start to type to you something into it, and you'll see when they close your chat window.

Ngrep allows you to filter packets by host, which gives you the ability to have a separate console window for your own MSN traffic and another for all the others', or for some other specific IP's MSN traffic. If you want, you can filter out everything but the actual chat (by ordering ngrep to match something specific that only occurs in chat-text packets, like the string "text/plain").

Btw, here in Estonia, most wireless hot spots are eavesdroppable. Both public (caffees) and private (drive around and catch a net without wep).

Btw, I'm not a hacker, I just did a little googleing.

So, now when we have michael's argument out of the way, how about that encryption?

Adding message encryption has ben on my todo list for a long time, it's just a matter of time (it will be a simple encryption but it should be good enough for most of us).

quote:

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Originally posted by michael_m91
The only way someone will read your conversations is throught the log files, so encrypt them why don't you?

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Erm, packet dump?

quote:

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Originally posted by michael_m91
Yah, like you know any hackers, so that would be a stupid feature.

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What have you been talking about this entire time?

It doesn't matter if you know a hacker. Just because I dont know a murderer doesn't mean that I cant get murdered.

quote:

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Originally posted by michael_m91
The only way someone will read your conversations is throught the log files, so encrypt them why don't you?

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And no, Your instant messages are sent accross a server to the other persons computer, UN-ENCRYPTED. Anybody who intercepted these messages could read them. If I remember correctly,  A project was ran about a year ago by some "hackers" who monitored a bunch of MSN Messenger conversations for a while to prove how unsafe the MSN Protocol is.

The things michael_m91 is saying are pure as it happens in the real world, in practice.

quote:

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Originally posted by NoName
And no, Your instant messages are sent accross a server to the other persons computer, UN-ENCRYPTED. Anybody who intercepted these messages could read them.

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I'm constantly surprised how paranoid people are... No hacker will seriously think about hacking into a server to monitor the traffic and to split out all the interesting stuff just to be left with your specific messages! They have 'better' things todo. And yes, you must be a realy very impressive professional hacker to pull this off.

The only exception would be if you're on a local network, where monitoring traffic from another computer is 'easy'. Easy enough for a somewhat experienced hacker. But 99,99999999999% of people out there are NOT on a local network, or at best on a local network in their own home. So, are you so paranoid that you think your 10 year old sister is going to "hack" you and monitoring your conversation with your schoolmate? come on.....

As michael_m91 said, the thing that can probably happen, and what you must fear the most, is that somebody in the family is reading your logs (although even this is rare), so simple encrypt them in that case...

Don't get me wrong, encryption can be a good thing (eg: companies), but don't get sucked into the "OMG They're watching me" paranoid stuff... For the average (and even pro) user, encryption of something like MSN Messenger is useless...

Ha, I even bet that, when I have access to your PC, there are tons more interesting and unprotected/un-encrypted stuff to read then some MSN logs...
(eg: a copy of the registry is enough, thank you )

So bottom line, don't get all paranoid people, encrypting is nice, but most of the time not needed at all, unless you're talking about bank account data and that sort of stuff...