Instant Messaging (IM) has grown rapidly among network users. It has even become a very important tool for the industry around the world. It is used in scheduling meetings, exchanging business information and clients information, and so on. Instant Messaging has been developed by private sectors or providers such as America Online Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN, and Yahoo; however, in 1998 a new protocol has seen the light as an open source Instant Messaging protocol and had the name of Jabber and thanks to Jeremie Miller the founder of the Jabber protocol. The project gathered wide public attention when it was discussed on the popular developer discussion website Slashdot in January 1999. In May 2000, the core Jabber protocols were released as open source reference server and it have not been changed to this day. Jabber uses client-server architecture, not a direct peer-to-peer architecture as some other messaging systems do. It is actually an Extensible Markup Language (XML) messaging protocol. It relies on XML document format in every aspect of the communication. [1] Jabber Protocol have gone a long way to be one of the most attractive protocol because of its open source and extensibility. Anyone can build or extend the jabber protocol functionality without actually modifying the core protocol and still maintain interoperability with other IM clients such as Yahoo and MSN. Moreover, as the usage of Jabber Instant Messaging technology increases, the need for information protection in the Jabber messaging medium also increases. This thesis will explore the Jabber protocol and the ability to secure a Jabber based communication over the network using third party cryptographic libraries. / Graduation date: 2003