IM Observatory (original) (raw)

This service has been discontinued since October 2022.

The IM Observatory was a project started in 2013 by security researcher Thijs Alkemade to test the security of services on the XMPP network.

For many years the project has been maintained by various community members, but after 10 years of operation, the service has become a growing burden to maintain in terms of both development and hosting. Meanwhile, the internet's security landscape has changed - OpenSSL, distributions and applications are now far more aware of the kinds of issues that the IM Observatory highlighted, and default settings are far more secure than they used to be. With the availability of Let's Encrypt since 2016 and today's widespread availability of free certificates, setting up a server that follows best security practices is now easier than ever.

The source code for the IM Observatory was all open-source, and can still be found under the xmpp-observatory organization on Github.

A similar project is under development that will provide many of the insights that the IM Observatory used to provide. An early preview of this service is available at inspect.xmpp.net and the code can be found at xmpp-observatory/testxmpp on Github. For quick testing that an XMPP service is functioning correctly with valid certificates, see also connect.xmpp.net.