The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a unique org – it’s an NGO in the field of defending civil liberties in the digital world.
The Foundation has now spearheaded research & published a kinda score card on its outcome for Internet messaging services, indeed Online communication tools, including mobile apps to povide users a guide on which ones are really safe & secure.
This scorecard represents only the 1st phase of the campaign. In later phases, the Foundation is planning to offer closer examinations of the usability & security of the tools that score the highest here.
(Warning: As such, the results in the scorecard should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security; they are merely indications that the projects are on the right track.)
Most apps that were analyzed failed in 1 or multiple categories. Only the following came out with flying colors:
ChatSecure + Orbot (encrypted chat application for iPhone and Android)
Cryptocat (Available for iOS, Os X, and web browsers)
Signal (iOS only)
Silent Circle (available for Android and iOS)
Silent Text (available for Android and iOS)
TextSecure (Android)
The EFF, in collaboration with Julia Angwin at ProPublica & Joseph Bonneau at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, have joined hands to launch a campaign for secure & usable crypto. As it spells it out on their Site: We are championing technologies that are strongly secure and also simple to use.
The Secure Messaging Scorecard examined dozens of messaging technologies & rated each of them on a range of security best practices. The campaign was focused on communication technologies — including chat clients, text messaging apps, email applications, & video calling technologies. These are the tools everyday users need to communicate with friends, family members, and colleagues.
For the survey, they also chose technologies that had a large user base–and thus a great deal of sensitive user communications–in addition to smaller companies that were pioneering advanced security practices.
If our readers wanna know further, click here to read up on this report.
Image Credit: EEF
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