Say "hello" to a different messaging experience. An unexpected focus on privacy, combined with all of the features you expect.
Visit whispersystems.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Aug 2013 – Feb 2017
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At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. A year ago, we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default. Over the past year, we...
Today, The Guardian published a story falsely claiming that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption contains a “backdoor.”
In the “first half of 2016” (the most specific we’re permitted to be), we received a subpoena from the Eastern District of Virginia. The subpoena required us to provide information about two Signal users for a federal grand jury investigation. We’ve designed the Signal service to minimize the dat...
Facebook Messenger has started rolling out Secret Conversations, a feature that enables end-to-end encryption for conversations within Messenger. Secret Conversations is built on Signal Protocol, a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol we developed for asynchronous messaging systems.
Today we’re making the Signal Desktop beta available. Signal Desktop brings the trusted private messaging experience of Signal to the desktop, with a simplicity that allows you to seamlessly continue conversations back and forth between your mobile device and your desktop computer.
At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. For the past three years, we’ve been developing a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make seamless end-to-end encrypted messaging possible. Today we’re excited ...
Today’s release of TextSecure is the final step in the transition from a private SMS app to a private asynchronous IM app that does not depend on SMS/MMS. Using the lessons we’ve learned from the SMS environment over the past four years, we’ve developed an open protocol for asynchronous chat that...
At Open Whisper Systems, we want everyone to have access to advanced secure communication tools that are as easy and reliable to use as making a normal phone call or sending a normal text message. Over the past year, we’ve been working to bring the privacy software we’ve developed for Android to ...
Today we’re releasing Signal 2.0, with support for TextSecure private messaging. It is now possible to send end-to-end encrypted group, text, picture, and video messages between Signal on iPhone and TextSecure on Android, all without SMS and MMS fees. Signal 2.0 blends private phone calls and pri...
At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. The foundation of our technology is Signal Protocol, a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems. It is built from the ground up to make seamless end-to-end encrypted messaging poss...
The latest Signal release for iPhone, Android, and Desktop now includes support for disappearing messages. The timer has come With this update, any conversation can be configured to delete sent and received messages after a specified interval. The configuration applies to all parties of a convers...
Today’s Signal release for Android and iOS includes beta support for video calls. This represents an entirely new calling infrastructure for Signal, and should increase voice call quality as well. We think it’s a big improvement, but we’re rolling it out in stages to collect feedback from people ...
Today we’ve started rolling out Signal for Android, which unites simple private messaging and simple private calling into a single app on Android. This is the culmination of our effort to combine TextSecure and RedPhone into one app, which we began on iPhone and are now bringing to completion on ...
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been developing open source “consumer-facing” software for the past four years. We want to share some of the things we’ve learned while doing it. As a software developer, I envy writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Unlike software, when they create something, it is...
The latest Signal release for Android includes support for GIF search and browsing. Signal has long supported sending and receiving GIFs, but this is an experiment that allows users to browse, search, and select popular GIFs from within Signal.
For the past few months, the Signal Desktop beta has been available through an invitation program. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback, made a lot of improvements, and are now ready to open the beta up for public access.
At Open Whisper Systems, we often get emails from people who’d like to donate money to the project. For an OSS project, particularly one that aspires to a collective sense of ownership, handling donations is not always entirely straightforward. The fundamental contradiction is that while donatio...
It’s 2015, and the end of the road for encrypted SMS/MMS in TextSecure. The TextSecure story started back in 2009, at the dawn of the smartphone era. Back then, TextSecure focused on securing the transport that everyone coming from feature phones was familiar with: SMS. Today, many things have c...
At Open Whisper Systems, we’re working to both advance the state of the art for secure communication and also reduce the friction required for ordinary people to make use of it. We want everyone to have access to advanced secure communication methods that are as easy and reliable to use as makin...
One of the major features we introduced in the TextSecure v2 release was private group chat. We believe that group chat is an important feature for encrypted communications projects, so we wanted to try to summarize some of the existing work in this area, as well as how TextSecure’s group chat pr...
Building a social network is not easy. Social networks have value proportional to their size, so participants aren’t motivated to join new social networks which aren’t already large. It’s a paradox where if people haven’t already joined, people aren’t motivated to join. The trouble is that whi...
Winter Break Of Code, Day Fifteen The 1988 film They Live is one of the last great masterpieces to come out of the Hollywood left. In the film, a drifter named John Nada discovers a box of sunglasses that, when worn, allows the wearer to really see the world around him. For instance, when wearin...
The latest Signal for Android release includes support for adding doodles, stickers, and text to images. This release also includes support for censorship circumvention in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Signal Protocol is a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems. We use Signal Protocol as the foundation for our own private messaging app, Signal, but also make Signal Protocol libraries available for other applications to use. Our Signal Protocol librar...
The latest Signal release includes some changes to the way safety numbers work. Safety numbers allow Signal users to verify the privacy of their communication with a contact, either by comparing a number or by scanning a single QR code. We recently introduced this new design as an update to Sign...
At Open Whisper Systems, we believe users should have both privacy and powerful services. Today we’re releasing Flock, a private cloud sync service for your personal data. Your contacts and calendars belong to you. So does your privacy. Flock makes it possible to have both.
As of our latest Android release, Signal builds are reproducible. Reproducible builds help to verify that the source code in our GitHub repository is the exact source code used to build the compiled Signal APK being distributed through Google Play.
Traditionally, asynchronous messaging systems such as email have relied on protocols like PGP or S/MIME for cryptographic security. These protocols work the way most people are familiar with: one who wishes to receive encrypted email advertises a public key, and those wishing to send encrypted e...
At Open Whisper Systems, we’ve been working on improving our encrypted asynchronous chat protocol for TextSecure. The TextSecure protocol was originally a derivative of OTR, with minor changes to accommodate it for transports with constraints like SMS or Push. Some of the recent changes we’ve ...