Cicada3301, a team of international anonymous developers, has launched the completely confidential Omega IM, an end-to-end encryption project that runs on the secure open protocol Proteus. The main difference between Omega and other instant messengers is that it does not store user data at all: it does not require access to the subscriber's address book, is not tied to accounts in social networks, does not disclose any metadata, in particular, the IP address of the device from which service entrance. The global goal of the creators of Omega is to provide the user with a convenient tool with well-thought-out functionality and a wide range of services, suitable for both personal and business communication, equipped with a reliable mechanism for verifying the authenticity of contacts and the security of data that a person receives from the network. Unfortunately, cases of personal data compromise with dramatic consequences are commonplace today, and instant messengers are often a source of leakage. For example, there is a known case when in 2018 one of the richest people on the planet, multibillionaire Jeff Bezos, was blackmailed due to the fact that the data of his personal correspondence in WhatsApp came to cybercriminals. The policy of the popular messenger is to collect and store a huge layer of information about the user: data from the device from which he logs into the service, contacts, geo and metadata, data backups and much more. Any vulnerability makes this data available to interested parties, which is in no way consistent with the idea of confidentiality of communication. The Omega IM team aims to solve this problem. In the messenger, the user creates a completely and completely anonymous account with which it will be impossible to identify him, since Omega servers store only one type of user-related data - the subscriber's identifier, anonymized and not tied to any device in the real world.
Advanced Proteus Encryption The Omega is powered by the fast and secure Proteus protocol. This is an open source protocol, at any time available for audit by specialists, in contrast to the other popular Telegram messenger, whose protocol, according to the policy of the management, is completely closed. Proteus is an independent implementation of protocols such as Axolotl and Double Ratchet, the successors of Off-The-Record, the best-in-class security protocol known for many years among communications professionals. The Omega IM code is written using End-to-End encryption. This type of encryption means that information is encrypted on the sender's device and decrypted on the recipient's device. The end-to-end encryption method itself, unfortunately, has not been a panacea for external intrusions into privacy for a long time - the very same WhatsApp also uses it, which does not prevent it from remaining vulnerable to hackers. To improve end-to-end traffic encryption, Omega uses two mechanisms. The first is an introduction to the encryption process with a special Double Ratchet (DR) algorithm. The DR algorithm works according to the Diffie-Hellman method, which implies that two parties receive a shared secret key through an unprotected communication channel, which is not protected from eavesdropping, but free from spoofing. The algorithm is complemented by the concept of preliminary key exchange at the stage of establishing a dialogue. At the same time, communication with the platform servers is carried out using the SSL protocol with TLS encryption version 1.3.