aka ...
Why Is The Government Afraid Of This iPhone App?
"Everything you do and say — email, text, phone — is monitored on some level."
...
A Wi-Fi sniffer can pluck emails right out of the air. Old texts linger on phones for years, waiting to be smuggled out with malware. Your cell signal is encrypted, but researchers have cracked it in as little as two hours. It rarely occurs to us as we blast out emoji, but for security professionals — a military contractor carrying sensitive information through a hotel in Hong Kong, for instance — that paranoia is a way of life.
well, something is about to change all that ...
Silent Circle App offers on-board military-level encryption for phone calls, texts, email and video. When it hits the App Store next week, anyone with an iPhone and $20 a month will have a secure line at their disposal. So when Janke's paramilitary friends are traveling through hostile territories, they can call home without worrying who they're tipping off.
It's a model for the nested cryptography of Silent Circle. The "safe room" is the iPhone processor, where all the encryption happens. By the time your text leaves the phone, it's been completely encrypted, unrecoverable without the key. To keep the key safe, Silent Circle uses the ZRTP protocol, a dance of data drops and verifications that's every bit as intricate as the Southern Command's network of swipes and codes. At the end of each call, the keys are erased, so nothing can be decrypted after the fact. The result is an airtight secure line, available to anyone with an iPhone for $20 a month — roughly the cost of an unlimited texting plan.
The guts of the program come from legendary cryptographer Phil Zimmermann, who released the groundbreaking PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) tool in 1991. It was the first open-source encryption tool, designed to let anti-nuclear activists plan actions without being surveilled. (It's still around, in case you need to, say, encrypt your hard drive.) But where PGP eventually became unwieldy, Silent Circle uses the app software model to streamline the program, and keep the complex protocols nearly invisible.
The other secret weapon is the iPhone itself. The portable processing power lets Silent Circle encrypt everything locally, and confine all the insecure data to a single device that most iPhone users will keep on their person at all times. The simple UI conventions make Silent Circle a lot easier to use than its predecessors, almost seamless mimics of the native iPhone calling tools. If it weren't for the new icon, you might not even know the difference.
One of the coolest tricks is a feature called Burn Notice that sends self-destructing texts and pictures. The relevant picture appears on your friend's phone — anything from a classified blueprint to something more Weineresque — and five minutes later, the picture burns up. There have been self-deleting message apps before (TigerText, for instance), but Silent Circle combines the service with the kind of airtight encryption protocols that are rarely been seen in the mobile world. Thanks to the closed platform and near-total data control, they can pull off a trick that's increasingly unthinkable in the modern day: unsending data. They can, in other words, un-ring the bell.
Read in full (credit) here
Why Is The Government Afraid Of This iPhone App?
"Everything you do and say — email, text, phone — is monitored on some level."
...
A Wi-Fi sniffer can pluck emails right out of the air. Old texts linger on phones for years, waiting to be smuggled out with malware. Your cell signal is encrypted, but researchers have cracked it in as little as two hours. It rarely occurs to us as we blast out emoji, but for security professionals — a military contractor carrying sensitive information through a hotel in Hong Kong, for instance — that paranoia is a way of life.
well, something is about to change all that ...
Silent Circle App offers on-board military-level encryption for phone calls, texts, email and video. When it hits the App Store next week, anyone with an iPhone and $20 a month will have a secure line at their disposal. So when Janke's paramilitary friends are traveling through hostile territories, they can call home without worrying who they're tipping off.
It's a model for the nested cryptography of Silent Circle. The "safe room" is the iPhone processor, where all the encryption happens. By the time your text leaves the phone, it's been completely encrypted, unrecoverable without the key. To keep the key safe, Silent Circle uses the ZRTP protocol, a dance of data drops and verifications that's every bit as intricate as the Southern Command's network of swipes and codes. At the end of each call, the keys are erased, so nothing can be decrypted after the fact. The result is an airtight secure line, available to anyone with an iPhone for $20 a month — roughly the cost of an unlimited texting plan.
The guts of the program come from legendary cryptographer Phil Zimmermann, who released the groundbreaking PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) tool in 1991. It was the first open-source encryption tool, designed to let anti-nuclear activists plan actions without being surveilled. (It's still around, in case you need to, say, encrypt your hard drive.) But where PGP eventually became unwieldy, Silent Circle uses the app software model to streamline the program, and keep the complex protocols nearly invisible.
The other secret weapon is the iPhone itself. The portable processing power lets Silent Circle encrypt everything locally, and confine all the insecure data to a single device that most iPhone users will keep on their person at all times. The simple UI conventions make Silent Circle a lot easier to use than its predecessors, almost seamless mimics of the native iPhone calling tools. If it weren't for the new icon, you might not even know the difference.
One of the coolest tricks is a feature called Burn Notice that sends self-destructing texts and pictures. The relevant picture appears on your friend's phone — anything from a classified blueprint to something more Weineresque — and five minutes later, the picture burns up. There have been self-deleting message apps before (TigerText, for instance), but Silent Circle combines the service with the kind of airtight encryption protocols that are rarely been seen in the mobile world. Thanks to the closed platform and near-total data control, they can pull off a trick that's increasingly unthinkable in the modern day: unsending data. They can, in other words, un-ring the bell.
Read in full (credit) here
