Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp all implemented Signal’s encrypted messaging protocol in their own apps last year, demonstrating that open-source doesn’t inherently harm a company’s growth.
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But Signal, a competing encrypted messaging app that has surged in popularity, has open-sourced its code from the beginning.
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But the company still stopped short of making its code public.Īfter all, Wickr is a business, and it’s easy to see how offering up code for free could cut into the company’s profit. Wickr tried to strike a balance later that year, when it published a white paper describing its methods. The Electronic Frontier Foundation marked Wickr down in a 2015 edition of its Secure Messaging Scorecard because the company had no public documentation of their encryption protocol and had not made their code available for review. That’s made it tough for Wickr to gain the trust of the most privacy-conscious users. This makes it possible for experts to reassure users that their messages are private, and lets researchers hunt for bugs that could make the app less secure.īut Wickr hasn’t gone open-source - until now. Users need to know that the app’s security claims are verified - that there’s math behind the marketing - and so it’s common for the makers of encryption products to make their code available for public inspection. Users might not be interested in the inner workings of most of the apps they use, but for encrypted messaging, trust is paramount. And by opening their code, they are giving the engineering community strong reasons to trust their platform,” Kaminsky said in a statement. With Wickr Professional, they are allowing teams to be confident that what is discussed is not distributed. “For years, Wickr has been at the forefront of ephemeral communication. The public review builds on private third party code reviews by security experts like Dan Kaminsky and Whitfield Diffie, and has been a long time in the making for Wickr. Wickr is publishing its code for Wickr Professional, the subscription-based enterprise version of its free messaging app, today for public review. Security researchers have wanted a peek at Wickr’s code since the secure messaging app launched in 2012, and now they’re finally getting that chance.
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