by forwardslash

At Open WhisperSystems, we’re working to both advance the state of the art for secure communication and also reduce the friction required for ordinary people to make use of it. We want everyone to have access to advanced secure communication methods that are as easy and reliable to use as making a normal phone call or sending a normal text message.

With these goals in mind, we’ve been working with CyanogenMod over the past few months. CyanogenMod is an open source aftermarket Android firmware distribution with ten million users and ~20k installs a day. Their rapid growth is beginning to rival Microsoft for the third largest smartphone OS distribution.

As of today, the TextSecure protocol will begin shipping as part of the CyanogenMod OS-level SMS provider, in an effort to provide completely transparent end-to-end text message encryption between all of their users.

One of the biggest reasons secure messaging solutions don't have wide adoption is because they simply aren't user friendly. Granted, crypto is hard, but efforts like this give me great hope.