“Confide can read user messages,” security researchers Fred Raynal and Jean-Baptiste Bédrune told TechCrunch this week. Cloakroom, on the other hand, cannot read your encrypted messages.
Ever since Sean Spicer snooped on all his staffers' phones for encrypted messaging apps, DC has been abuzz with ways to thwart government spooks and connect with their colleagues privately. Wikileaks' Vault 7 release this week just added fuel to the fire. The leaks revealed that even trustworthy apps like WhatsApp may be vulnerable to the CIA and other hackers.
Cloakroom's private chat functionality sacrifices a little convenience in order to offer its users full control over their own data, including what to keep, what to delete, and what to encrypt. Users can enable encryption for any conversation, and because we don't send your private encryption keys over the internet the way Confide and even WhatsApp do, the neither I or CIA can use that vulnerability to spy on your discreet conversations.
To prove that, I'm open sourcing Cloakroom's encrypted chat code for iOS, so anyone may review our process and affirm for themselves that Cloakroom is a safer (and more fun) way to chat with your colleagues.
Happy hacking.