I not only work in Information Security, I love it. In the era of “everything digital”, nothing else is as important. Well imagine my excitement when I learned of a newly formed company, called SilentCircle, which was promising a very secure yet easy to use communication product.

The company

The company says that it was started by 2 former Nacy Seals and the world-renown creator of PGP, Phil Zimmermann. It wanted to create a military grade encryption product for securing phone calls (VOIP), text messages, emails and video. It’s goal was to create a secure product, with the ease of use of an iPhone app (all for $20 per subscriber per month).

Services include:

• Encrypted voice
• Encrypted text
• Encrypted Video
• Encrypted email
• Ability to call anyone (non subscriber). Your session is encrypted until the SilentCircle servers

The need

Anyone with a public profile has a need for secure communication. Secure from whom? Secure from competitors, government agencies and foreign nations.

How

The design of the solution has been well thought out and all encryption is performed on the end device. Once a communication stream is completed, the keys used to encrypt that communication are securely deleted making future decoding more difficult. They store only minimal system logs (required to maintain the service) and these logs are stored in Canada and Switzerland (who have stricter privacy laws).

They offer a service called Burn Notice which automatically destroys the sent information (photo, message, email, etc) after a pre-determine timeframe.

Resistance

Current US wiretapping laws do not apply to VOIP but some officials are pushing to have these older laws amended to include VOIP. It is conceivable that future laws may make this type of service illegal or highly regulated but [for now] you can rest assured that your discussing with nana about her top secret apple pie recipe will stay confidential.

Verdict

Since I haven’t tested the service, I can’t vouch for how it will actually work but it looks great on paper. If you are concerned about eavesdropping or espionage, take a look at this new tool.