Demand for secret messaging apps is rising as Trump takes office

From The Verge:

Marlinspike’s goal isn’t unicorn riches, but unicorn ubiquity. For that, he wants to make encrypted messaging as easy — as beautiful, as fun, as expressive, as emoji-laden — as your default messaging app. His reason: if encryption is difficult, it self-selects for people willing to jump through those hoops. And bad guys are always willing to jump through the hoops. “ISIS or high-risk criminal activity will be willing to click two extra times,” he told me. “You and I are not.”

Marlinspike’s protocol for secure communication is incredibly effective at protecting message content from third party observation. Few protocols are nearly as effective, however, and most chat companies now claim that they offer ‘secure’ communciations. Almost no consumers are situated to evaluate those claims: there are known deficient applications that are widely used, despite the security community having identified and discussed their problems. Encryption isn’t actually going to provide the security that most users think it does so unless the best-of-class protocols are widely adopted.¹

The problem of imperfect consumer knowledge is a hard one to solve for, in part because the security community cannot evaluate all claims of encryption. In work that I’ve been involved in we’ve seen simplistic ciphers, hard coded passwords, and similar deficiencies. In some cases companies have asserted they secure data but then fail to encrypt data between smartphone apps and company servers. It’s laborious work to find these deficiencies and it’s cheap for companies to claim that they offer a ‘secure’ product. And it ultimately means that consumers (who aren’t experts in cryptography, nor should they be expected to be such experts) are left scratching their head and, sometimes, just throwing their hands up in frustration as a result of the limited information that is available.