We started talking about Messaging Layer Security (MLS) last December and we would now like to give an overview of what was discussed during the second MLS interim meeting that was held on 14th and 15th of January 2019 in Mountain View, CA. Wire is a founding member of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF working group and continues to contribute with ideas and code.
More often than not teams need to work alongside contractors, clients or suppliers. Sometimes temporary but sometimes long-term. Emails are becoming dated and private messengers have no place in business. The possibility to communicate securely and fast with externals without granting too much access, is of great value. Why not use the proven secure collaboration platform already in use and extend that to partners?
We have found time to squeeze in yet another feature release before the end of a very successful year. Read receipts are now available on all platforms and devices!
The end of the year marks a good time to reflect on the passed year and the achievements made by the team. 2018 was, in many ways, a landmark year for Wire. From a product perspective we launched Wire Pro, our business product, in early 2018 and later added Wire Red, our unique crisis collaboration tool, to our product line. That in itself was a big milestone for us. We can now see business’ over five continents using our products.
Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is a new end-to-end encrypted protocol that is developed by an IETF workgroup. Wire initiated the idea, along with Mozilla and Cisco, in 2016 with other contributors joining the efforts later: the University of Oxford, Facebook, INRIA, Google, Twitter. MLS’s major goals are to make end-to-end encrypted messaging in (large) groups efficient and more secure and to become an open standard.
Focus on security and privacy has been important for Wire from day one. Over the years we've taken numerous steps to strengthen our technology and sharpen our privacy-by-design approach to our product and business model. This is more relevant than ever with many starting to realize the destructive effects of weak security and lack of privacy on both day-to-day business operations, and our lives as people who trust our most intimate details to various online services.
Impacting as many as 500 million customers, Marriott’s data breach is one of the largest in history. While we don’t yet know the root cause of the breach (which impacts hotels within the Starwood Group and is believed to predate Marriott’s acquisition of the group); what surprised many people is just how long the door was left open for the attackers – four years in total!
The lack of end-to-end encryption in Skype has long been a concern for security conscious business users. However, in August 2018 Microsoft announced the availability of Private Conversations, offering users the ability to protect chats, calls and file sharing with end-to-end encryption built on the Signal protocol.
We’ve spoken about the importance of secure client communications before. From an accidental leak of information, to a malicious cyber-attack, compromising client confidentiality can result in the sort of reputation damage that can be hard to come back from. But while organizations understand this, too often we find employees defaulting back to less secure communication methods. Why? It comes down to two key factors.
Nowadays, the press doesn’t have to look too far for the next cyber attack story! Whether it’s the surprise theft of customer data, like British Airways suffered this year, or a fresh Facebook hack, if there’s one thing we’ve learned this year – no one, regardless of size and sophistication, is immune to attack.
