Why trust Open Whispers Systems with your security?

Image courtesy of Knight Foundation at Flickr.com

What is Open Whispers System?

Open Whispers Systems (OWS) was founded by Moxie Marlinspike in 2013 as a nonprofit software group that wanted to find a way to secure voice calling and instant messaging and did so through an app called Signal. By encrypting communication, it allowed thousands of people to maintain highly secure and encrypted conversations with loved ones and friends. Since they are a non-profit they depend on donations and grants, and they publish all of their software as free and open-source. Normally, encrypting your communication was something you needed working knowledge of certain technology to understand and even more so apply. It all seemed way too confusing and unreachable, but OWS has made it an everyday possibility for all us mortals that don’t understand how it all works. Their reputation now precedes them now, reason why most feel very comfortable entrusting their communication security in their open source apps, including whistleblower and privacy advocate, Edward Snowden.

What is their purpose?

By turning your mobile device into a safe way to communicate, they are ensuring that the average person can find the level of security they want and in all the levels of communication they want from emails, to voice calls and instant messaging. Their trustworthy apps are spreading fast and have now even partnered with the largest instant messaging app in the world right now, WhatsApp.

In Marlinspike’s words, “We want to make private communication simple. Our objective is to do new cryptographic research and development that advances the state of the art while simultaneously making it frictionless and accessible for anyone.”

What apps or systems have they developed?

They have designed many apps that all are geared towards helping with this same purpose. Here a some of them:

BitHub: This service for BitCoin automatically pays a percentage to the funds in this app for every submission to a GitHub repository

Signal: One of their most popular open-source app, which is available on iOS and Android, is used to encrypt all communications to other Signal users with end-to-end protocols. With Signal you can send group messages, media messages and attachments. With this app, you can make calls over Wifi or data connection and they are completely free. The app has a series of ways of assuring that your call has the best security including a no man-in-the-middle attack, secret words on both ends and their communications go through more than dozens of servers spread out over 10 countries.
Signal Desktop: This Chrome app version of Signal can link with other Signal users. In it’s beta version it can only link with the Android version of Signal.

TextSecure-Server: This is the message routing software that is used in Signal data channel. The client-server communication is protected by TLS.

They have also other apps and software that are no longer active like:

Flock: This app used to sync calendar and contact information on Android devices, where users could host their own server. The service was later terminated on October 1, 2015 due to high server costs.

Red Phone: This Android app is a stand-alone for encrypted voice calling services. It was designed specially for VoIP calls on mobile phones with end-to-end encryption. RedPhone was later merged with TextSecure on November of last year to become Signal, OPW’s trademark app.

TextSecure: Used to be a stand-alone application for encrypting messages on Android until it merged with RedPhone. I could send and receive SMS, MMS and instant messages. It used also used end-to-end encryption to secure all message among users on this network.

Image courtesy of  Richard-G at Flickr.com

What is new with OPW?

The team of OPW, lead by Moxie Marlinspike, is becoming very well known for its advocacy of privacy and is even initially teaming together with Twitter to help develop a more secure server, and the latest collaborative project with Facebook’s WhatsApp to develop a complete end-to-end encryption that was launched recently. Even though, these other projects continue to move their efforts of the importance of privacy to the apps people are currently using, their original project Signal paved the road enabling journalists, activists and democracy advocates to communicate securely without making it even more difficult to make their visions come true. In a way it could be said that it has saved lives and they continue raising the bar by bringing their highest level of security to the globalized messaging app, WhatsApp.

The rest of the team, Tyler Reinhard, Lilia Kai, and Riya Abraham, are all on board while trying to bring security to everyone’s pocket with a messaging and calling service where you can say anything, be yourself, stay private and organized without having to pay extra. Since it’s open source, they are constantly updating and tweaking the codes to make sure it is the highest possible security available. Marlinspike continues to push the boundaries, along with his team, to make sure individual can easily and seamlessly keep their information safe.