Check Back Soon: New Secure Messaging Guide On the Way!
In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of the EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.
Version 1.0 of our scorecard evaluated apps and tools based on a set of seven specific criteria ranging from whether messages were encrypted in transit to whether or not the code had been recently audited. Though all of those criteria are necessary for a tool to be secure, they can't guarantee it; security is hard, and some aspects of it are hard to measure.That's why we're working on a new, updated, more nuanced format for the Secure Messaging Guide. We're excited about this update, and hope to post it soon.
In the mean time, if you're looking for a recommendation about what tools to use to keep your messages secure, check out our Surveillance Self-Defense guide for tutorials on:
How to use OTR on Mac, Windows, or Linux.
How to use PGP on Mac or Windows.