With all the privacy concerns in the news as of late, many users have been seeking out ways to protect themselves. One group in general is the extremely popular CyanogenMod who recently launched “Privacy Guard” which blocks your info from all apps, and now it appears they’ll be putting their efforts into a secure and encrypted messaging service for Android smartphones and tablets.
The popular developer Koush announced on the official +CyanogenMod Google+ page that they’ve built a service called PushSMS. Which will be an encrypted and secure messaging service similar to Apple’s iMessage in terms of security. In light of the recent NSA and PRISM news, many have found that iMessage is pretty secure, and even Apple can’t snoop in on what users send, so naturally developers are working on bringing that to Android.
Things get pretty technical and hard to understand for those normal folks, but he explains things a bit in a simple fashion with this statement below. Basically confirming a new push-based messaging service.
I’ve built out a secure/push based messaging plugin for CyanogenMod. Messages between two CyanogenMod will be encrypted end to end and sent over GCM. It’s built into the framework; so it works transparently, even with third party apps.
It’s basically PGP (encryption + authenticity) for text messages, built into the system.
3rd party apps and messaging clients will all be able to use this, and be completely encrypted and secure. Awesome right? It appears however that the service will only work with CyanogenMod devices, so you won’t get the same protection when messaging your friends using normal devices, or something other than CyanogenMod.
We’ll keep an eye on this, as it’s still under heavy development, but should be in nightly builds soon enough. Keep up the good work CyanogenMod!
CM really looks like they have a kick ass custom rom for sure! I hate that I can’tgive up on my gs4 stock camera and features 🙁 the stock camera is worth puting up with tw and the amazing amount of bloat. From samsung and at&t
I bought a Nexus 4 straight from Google Play around January, by April I’d swapped to CyanogenMod 10.1 RC1 because of certain little things I didn’t like about stock – mainly the lack of long-press symbols on the keyboard, and the fact that the volume keys didn’t skip tracks when the phone is locked.
They’ve cut down a fair bit on how customisable the CM experience is since the days of 7.2 on my HTC Wildfire (buzz) but it’s still a far more flexible and personal OS than stock, without changing the UI much from AOSP or slowing your phone down with crapware like manufacturers/carriers do.
I can’t recommend CyanogenMod more highly – if you have a phone they support, flash it as soon as they build RCs or stable for it.