Jein
Finally, Wickr has released its core crypto code to the open source community.
The end-to-end messaging service launched in 2012, long before Signal took off and rolled out encryption of its own.Yet Wickr became one of the last to publish its code to the open source community.
The service’s use of encrypted and disappearing messaging, à la , helped to gain users’ that their messages wouldn’t , leaked, or exposed to either hackers or federal agents.
But the company’s choice to restrict access to its crypto code made it for anyone to be sure that the service was free from vulnerabilities or backdoors, except for a very few select cryptographers and security auditors.
Wickr hopes that publishing the source code will allay those fears and nullify one of the app’s critiques – that nobody could be certain the app was truly secure.
The company released the code on GitHub along with a technical white paper.
„It is now time to begin opening the source code so our customers and partners can easily review the crypto codebase and validate the promises we make to Wickr’s users,“ said Joel Wallenstrom, Wickr’s executive.
But while the source code release was months in the making, the company didn’t consider the move until recently.
When we met former chief executive in May, he said in the face of his company’s critics there there would be no release of source code, citing the company’s proprietary intellectual property and a for-profit business structure as barriers.
He departed the company several months later, and the company underwent an internal about-face.
While the service was initially used by dissidents and activists, the company late last year announced its leap into government and enterprise markets with its secure professional-level service in an effort to challenge the collaborative apps, like Slack and Convo, while making the service free for personal use.
Our crypto library is open source for review and audit purposes (https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c). Our client and server code is not.
Our open source strategy makes sense for our business today. We understand that some users have strong opinions on the subject. With them we agree that transparency is an important element of software security. We’ll also say that open source isn’t the only answer.
We invest heavily - and we mean heavily - in third-party security testing. Our products have been vetted by world-class independent experts since 2014. We engage world leading security consulting firms on a near continuous basis to perform code audits, penetration tests, and architecture reviews, and we’ve provided public transparency into the methodology and results of this testing in our Customer Security Promise program (https://wickr.com/security/).
We believe our approach has put as much meaningful, independent scrutiny on our code and product as has been put on any open source project. Look for our Customer Security Promises and open source strategy to evolve over time as we strive to do more and share more related to the security of our products.