A Key Update Mechanism for Social Media based on Tangle

Social media applications have become a crucial part of our society for sharing ideas and information. To ensure personal privacy, the applications should protect sensitive information and maintain confidentiality during communications. WhatsApp and Telegram, two of the most popular messaging applications, implement end-to-end encryption to ensure security and privacy. Since they rely on central servers to manage communications, questions arise about whether users can fully trust these platforms. In this paper, a novel decentralized social media application model based on IOTA’s Tangle is proposed to address potential security challenges about the centralized architecture. We implemented the proposed system where hash values of user keys and message information are stored on the Tangle. This design provides an efficient message transmission, where Tangle scales with increased user participation, reducing latency and improving overall user experience. The proposed model includes a secure key update mechanism for preventing replay attacks and linking past communication to users that ensures both parties consistently utilize the most current keys in their communications.