Enterprises, government contractors, the military — what do they all have in common? Their success relies on good communication. Employees and consultants need to collaborate with one another wherever they’re located, and they also need to easily communicate with different offices and outside vendors.
But with cybercrime on the rise, it’s important that these communications are totally secure, without any opportunity for malicious actors to intercept text messages, listen in on voice calls or video conferences, or steal shared files.
Not wanting to become victims of the next headlining breach, organizations are looking for a secure communications solution — and are increasingly choosing Wickr. It’s clear to those who do their research that Wickr is the most secure communications solution available today, for a number of important reasons.
Advanced End-to-End Encryption
One of the most effective ways to secure communications is to encrypt the data on every connected device. Even better is end-to-end encryption, which encrypts your data the entire time it travels from sender to recipient.
With end-to-end encryption, data is encrypted on the sender’s device and remains encrypted until it has been delivered to the recipient. There is no point in the communications process when the data is left unencrypted, unlike other encryption services that decrypt the data at the server. With end-to-end encryption, any malicious actor who tries to intercept a message in transit will not be able to decipher the data, leaving your information protected.
For even greater security, Wickr uses 256-bit authenticated end-to-end encryption. With this level of encryption, it would take trillions of years to break a single key.
Perfect Forward Secrecy
Imagine a building that you can enter, but all the rooms are locked. It seems pretty secure — until you realize that every single locked door can be opened with the same master key. Even further, the master key promises to unlock any future buildings that the contractor makes. That master key becomes pretty tempting to a would-be intruder.
This is how traditional encryption works — all back and forth communications between two people are encrypted using the same key. Of course, best practices dictate that you do everything you can to keep the encryption keys safe. But if the hacker is able to figure out your encryption key, they have access to all of your past communications and, assuming you are unaware of the breach and therefore haven’t changed the key, any future communications you may have.
Perfect forward secrecy creates a new key for every piece of data. So going back to our example, perfect forward secrecy is like having a building with many locked doors, but each one has a different key. If an intruder is somehow able to steal one key, he can get into one room. The rest of the rooms — and any future builds — are protected.
With perfect forward secrecy, keys used to encrypt and decrypt messages change constantly. This ensures that, in the unlikely occurrence an individual key is somehow compromised, only a small portion of the user’s data is exposed.
In Wickr’s implementation of perfect forward secrecy, every new message, phone call, video conference, and file receives its own unique random encryption key prior to transmission. Even if the key for a given message is compromised, no other message is affected. By generating a new key for each piece of communication, all previous and future data is completely secured.
Zero Trust Platform Design
Zero trust works on the precept of “never trust, always verify.” This means that no individual or entity has automatic access to shared communications and files.
In the case of a breach, Wickr’s servers are incapable of leaking any user communications on the platform. All messages and files are encrypted in transit and deleted upon delivery, and Wickr never has your decryption keys.
Ephemeral Messaging
As Wickr CEO Joel Wallenstrom says, “The best defense is having nothing that requires defending.” Files and messages can’t be breached if they’re not there.
That’s why Wickr uses ephemeral messaging, which means that all communications and files can be automatically deleted based on the time they were sent and/or the time they were read. After the selected amount of time has elapsed, the data is put through a digital “shredder” and replaced with random bits of code. These automatically deleted messages can never be recovered.
Open Source Code and Third-Party Audits
At Wickr, we believe that transparency is essential to strong cybersecurity. For this reason, all of Wickr’s code is open source so that experts outside the company can inspect the code for flaws. In fact, Wickr offers a $100,000 bug bounty for anyone that finds bugs in its code.
Wickr also conducts continuing audits by third parties to make sure that its platform is as safe, secure, and bug-free as possible. By maintaining this level of transparency, we can ensure that we are fully protecting our users and their data.
Our Customer Security Promises
To further cement Wickr’s status as the premier secure communications solution available today, consider our published Customer Security Promises. These promises inform everything Wickr does — they guide our engineering processes, create a level of transparency for our independent security testing, and help Wickr users understand the level of security that we aspire to deliver.
What are our Customer Security Promises?
- The Wickr protocol provides end-to-end encryption and integrity protection.
- The Wickr protocol enforces forward secrecy.
- The Wickr protocol enforces authentication of messages.
- Any compromise of the Wickr infrastructure does not compromise message content.
- Wickr manages sensitive customer data in cloud-hosted networks in accordance with the Wickr Privacy Policy.
By adhering to these Customer Security Promises, we ensure our customers that we are and will remain the most secure communications solution available. It’s a promise to provide secure communications for every employee of every organization that uses the Wickr platform — and one that will evolve as both technology and security needs continue to evolve over time.
Wickr: The Most Secure Communications Solution for Your Organization
At Wickr, we understand the necessity of choosing the most secure communications solution for your enterprise or organization. Our communications solutions offer secure messaging and collaboration with industry-leading end-to-end encryption. Contact us to learn more about how Wickr can be your all-inclusive secure communications platform.
Contact us today to learn more about the most secure communications solution available in 2021!