Encryption New on Minds
I'm incredibly excited to introduce to you a new product we've been working on– encrypted chat..
Security and privacy are fundamental to our civil liberties and, with the advent of technology and the age of the internet, we have become complacent in handing over vast amounts of data to companies and governments. We must do more to protect ourselves.
By using asymmetrical encryption (public and private keys), Minds has ZERO knowledge of the content of your messages – the way it should be! Messages are encrypted using a user's publicly available key and can only be decrypted using the password protected private key belonging to the respective users.
Encrypted messages and emails have been around for a while, but they come with a steep learning curve which tends to put people off. We believe that encryption is not just for nerds, it's for everyone. Our encryption aims to be so sleek you don't even know it's there.
We are using the openssl functionalities built into php in order to achieve this with very strong RSA4096 / SHA512 password protected keys, of which the password is never stored on minds and is only ever known to the user. For client side encryption/decryption we are also making use of the JSEncrypt library which is an incredibly useful and light weight library.
Some developers will have you believe that you shouldn't worry about scalability until it is a problem, ie. you have a lot of traffic. Why not just build and design it to scale well in the first place? We've been using Cassandra as our main database for 18 months now - It is fantastic and very complimentary to this chat project... more on Cassandra in another blog though.
Above all, Minds forces the use of HTTPS which ensures that all communication from your browser to our servers are safe, secure, encrypted and snooper free.
This is only the beginning. We plan on expanding encryption to the other areas of the site and also extending our chat services even more.
Want to know more? Send me a message, encrypted of course.
