Wickr is Quicker to Start: Know Advantage

If you’ve ever been part of a virtual team collaboration room, you know how easy it is for messages and files to get buried in the mix. The time spent scrolling back through the conversation is just about the least productive thing you could be doing. Wickr Pro does offer a robust search tool which allows you to find keywords brought up in past messages, but did you know that Wickr Pro also allows you to star messages so you can easily come back to them later? This feature is incredibly useful when you know you will need to reference a file or a message but you don’t have time to get to it now.

“We need to see innovation among technology teams and an industry wide move to build ‘private by design’ spaces that offer an alternative to the persuasive technologies and user manipulation techniques that focus only on monetizing user data at the expense of privacy.”

– Joel Wallenstrom, CEO

Advantage Wickr:

# Communicate seamlessly across all platforms (mobile, Desktop and tablets)

# Unlimited messaging (1:1 and Rooms), voice and video chats all end-to-end encrypted

# Unlimited search across all messages and files

# File, video, photo transfers you name it you can share it securely

# Create Teams and Networks to mimic your company organization

# Secure screen sharing, location sharing and online status

# Communicate within your Team or with any of the millions of other Wickr users and know it’s always end-to-end encrypted

Absolutely, anyone can invite your team with the convenient Network Dashboard, and download the app to get your own secure and private Wickr network in minutes. Take control of your most critical communications and data exchanges. On multiple networks? No problem, Wickr has cross-network communications with other Wickr Pro and Wickr Me users. It’s that easy.

Wickr employs multiple layers of encryption to secure your data and messages including:

# Wickr username, application ID and device ID are cryptographically hashed with multiple rounds of salted SHA256.

# Data at rest and in transit is encrypted with AES256.

# As part of Perfect Forward Secrecy, each message has a new encryption key that is deleted as soon as message is decrypted.

# Message encryption keys are encrypted with a key produced using ECDHE.

# Messages are bound to both the receiver’s application and device.

# No password or password hashes ever leave user device.

# All user content is forensically wiped from the device after it expires.

# Your UDID (Unique Device Identifier) is never uploaded to our servers so you are always anonymous to us.

The rapid proliferation of Secure Messaging Protocols (SMPs) in government, industry, and the wider public have accelerated both industry and academic cryptographic and security engineering research and development to create better SMPs. In this post, I’ll go over several of the most innovative and exciting directions these efforts are leading.

Starring a message is easy. On a mobile device, simply hold down on the message you want to star. That will bring up a menu with an option to star the message. On a desktop computer, you can click the star that appears at the bottom of every message.

To view all of your starred messages on a mobile device, click the star icon in the search bar at the top of your home screen. On a desktop computer, click the search icon first to bring up the search bar and click on the star icon there.

Wickr Enterprise is a fully-customizable self-hosted platform for secure communication across your entire organization. Ensure your business collaboration is in compliance with required security and retention standards, configurable down to each team and user.

Wickr provides end-to-end (E2E) security, forward secrecy (FS), and asynchronous communication, as well as some important milestones over the past 3 decades that laid the foundations for today’s R&D.

The Wickr Messaging Protocol and Double Ratchet based SMPs have shown us how to get E2E security, FS, and at least some level of PCS for our asynchronous message protocols. But truth be told, this is just the beginning of what we could ask for from an SMP. To that end, various companies and research institutions have stepped up their R&D efforts, resulting in a bunch of new and interesting ideas.

Wickr supports the managed secure messaging & federation, with the demand are the messaging networks which have special administrator users in charge of them. The admins can do things like manage user accounts on the network and set security policies. For more info see my blog post on the subject over here. It seems quite clear that as SMPs are used more and more within organizations (be they government, industry, or others), we will see more and more need for managed secure messaging.

Strictly speaking, having a managed network like Wickr does not automatically place any special requirements on the underlying SMP. However, a natural and very powerful feature managed networks can have is the capability to federate with other managed networks (say, within a wider government or with the networks of business partners). That is, users of different federated networks can communicate with each other (subject to the restrictions defined by their administrators).

For this to work, the SMP (or at least its routing and setup) must be designed to accommodate federation. This, in turn, raises interesting (and sometimes surprisingly subtle) security considerations.

Expert says, It requires striking a balance between the privacy of users with respect to admins vs. the capability of those admins to dictate and enforce federation policy. After all, the more E2E crypto used by the SMP, the less insight into the communication there will be by middle-men such as the admins.

Wickr is one of the few exceptions, with federation capabilities of its managed Wickr Pro networks (which can also federate with the unmanaged public Wickr Messenger network).

Group Messaging, from the perspective of the day-to-day use of secure messaging, one of the most straightforward focuses of research is the goal to support much larger groups.

There are various messaging layer security is there and this brings us to the bleeding edge of R&D around SGMP; namely the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) work group. The goal is to develop a new, cryptographically principled SGMP as an open protocol for use by the wider industry as a foundation for building asynchronous secure communication platforms.