A novel method for remote monitoring of instant chat in LAN

QQ, a kind of common IM (instant messaging) software, is becoming more and more popular in China. Although it has many advantages (such as convenience and security), there are many flaws as well, e.g. someone may use it to spread rumors, even do some illegal things. The aim of this paper is to record the QQ chats of all computers in the LAN, and monitor abnormal or illegal activities via QQ immediately. Usually, the staple method to record chat is to catch the network packets propagating in the LAN, such as the E-mail records, the MSN records, and the web page records. Since the QQ packets are all encrypted with the unique QQ id, the above method can not work efficiently to acquire the QQ records. In this paper, a new novel method is proposed to solve the problem. By using a client software, it transfers the chat records from the specific PC to the server, decrypts and then records them in the database. Our experiment confirms that the proposed method is effective and feasible for remote monitoring.