Free iPhone app uses military-grade technology so that you can securely communicate with anyone and leave no trace of texts, pictures, audio and video messages that you send them.
Wickr is an amazing free iPhone app that, to be honest, everybody should be using these days. The smartphone age may have brought us the convenience of instant communication, but it has also left us vulnerable to the prying eyes of corporations and business, and open to malicious acts by family and friends who may decide to share your texts, pictures, audio and video messages with the rest of the world.
Wickr uses military-grade technology so that you can securely communicate with anyone and leave no trace of text messages, pictures, audio and video messages that you may send them.
“For message encryption, Wickr’s patent-pending ‘Digital Security Bubble’ relies on both the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric block cipher implemented with random 256-bit keys and the asymmetric RSA-4096 algorithm,” note the developers.
All of your communication data is stored in this fashion during their “entire life span” and can only be read by you and the recipients on the devices you authorize.
“Wickr’s mission is to provide secure communications that Leave No Trace,” they add. “People are being tracked online and their information is being sold in ways they do not understand by numerous governments and corporations throughout the world. Your private communications are worth money.”
“Online communications should be untraceable by default.”
Text messages, photos, audio and video messages sent via Wickr are never stored can be set to a specific “self-destruct” time of your choosing: from a minimum of 1 second (for highly sensitive info?) up to a maximum of 6 days. This gives you complete control over how long that person can view your text messages, photos, audio and video messages before they’re erased completely.
And the developers stress “completely.”
Usually, when you try to delete anything from your phone, metadata from the file remains on it’s HDD, where skilled hackers, forensics investigators or law enforcement officials can piece it back together. Wickr’s app contains an anti-forensics feature — the mobile equivalent of a paper shredder — that erases deleted files for good by writing over that metadata with gibberish text.
Wickr’s features include:
- military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages
- sender-based control over who can read messages, where and for how long
- best available privacy, anonymity and anti-forensic features
- security that is simple to use
To those people further concerned about their anonymity for even using the Wickr App itself, the developers stress that you have nothing to fear.
“Your username, along with all other user and device information related to your account, is irreversibly encoded with multiple rounds of salted cryptographic hashing prior to being sent to our servers,” they write. “Even we cannot determine the actual values based on the hashed values we store.”
Both sender and receiver must have the app to communicate, and an Android version is in the works for those iOS users with contacts that haven’t bought into the Apple universe just yet.
Stay tuned.
[email protected] | @jaredmoya
Download Wickr (iTunes store)
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
