Secure Mobile Communication: How To Shield A Secret

May 27

Communication is an essential part of business; corporate privacy is an obligatory work condition. If we combine these two notions, we'll get an ever acute issue in the world of business - secure communication. Security does not depend on the size of your enterprise; neither does on the industry you are in. Security is a general must, and it's hard to argue.

Online has always had a lot to do with risks of compromising the privacy; especially in the world where news about cyberattacks and sensitive data exposures frequently visit the headlines. Being online means communicating around the world, but as well it means exposing your negotiations and mail to possible leaks. Authentication and data encryption/decryption are mentioned as great means of ensuring safety of conversations. But how does it exactly work within the application?

Off-the-Record Protocol

First of all confidentiality concerns apps for instant messaging and e-mails. Here is often involved a reliable security protocol for text transmissions, which is called Off-the-Record messaging (OTR). Nobody can read or intercept and modify the content of conversations (messages and e-mails) between two participants. How is it achieved?

Temporary Keys

If an encrypted message is intercepted, it cannot be shown as a perceptible text on another device. A device needs a key to perform the decryption algorithm. The great advantage of OTR is that it utilizes temporary keys, each one valid per message. These keys cannot be tracked; that's why each sent message can be normally read on the other participant's device only.

Authentication

Here we face another issue - choosing the participant's device for authentication. You must be sure who you communicate with. It's usually implemented by sending/answering a question to verify the identity. That's how nobody can impersonate the other participant. Thereafter a secure conversation can be started.

Notifications

Urgency matters. Enabled notifications can warn one person, if the other one sends a message or an e-mail. Protection ensures that nothing discloses the content of the sent message. There can also be implemented automatic deletion of sent messages.

No Logging

The sent/received messages and e-mails can be housed in the mobile devices of the two participants. There is no logging on the server. Such information as time, duration and content of the conversation, can never be disclosed. As well both participants stay anonymous since it's impossible to track and identify them; moreover, it is impossible to check or to prove that a certain message was ever sent or received by a certain person.

User Interface

What's the additional asset, is that secure communication is by no means more complicated than the usual one; and it has the same conveniences, statuses etc. Thus can be created an intuitive user interface, which will make entering a protected conversation no harder than the login process of usual e-mail or chat applications.

By combining these features we get a perfect application for secure communication. No one can fully avoid risks; but such mobile software drastically reduces them to minimum. What matters is the expertise of your software developer in creating advanced solutions for this issue. And if there is something that Google doesn't know, that's the secrets you keep to yourself and to ones you communicate with.