London : SRD Wireless today announced the launch of PQChat, a free app for iOS based on SRD’s own Never-The-Same (NTS) encryption. Designed to make communications between people and businesses as safe, secure and private as possible, NTS protects data using the McEliece cryptosystem, the strongest currently known. Unlike other standards such as RSA, the McEliece system has never been broken; even using techniques designed for the new era of quantum computing. PQChat allows users to share and delete encrypted messages, voice, video and images as they desire, while the application itself holds no personal information on users. As a result, users can have the utmost confidence that their private communications remain just that.

“The ongoing Snowden revelations have brought home just how easily accessible our personal information is to the NSA or other groups. Yet most people are still handing over information to data miners, spammers and criminals without understanding what they are doing,” said Andersen Cheng, Co-founder and CEO of SRD Wireless. “People need to take back control of their data: even the smallest amount of personal information can compromise your privacy and security. Modern communication tools simply aren’t built with this as a priority and so make compromises in order to allow communication. Our aim with PQChat is to place end-to-end security at the heart of the application.”

Current encryption tools are facing a major threat from the ongoing evolution of quantum computing, which will make breaking even highly sophisticated algorithms simple and immediate. Most of the existing encryption standards have already been broken in theory, with only the IT horsepower needed to actually run these processes preventing widespread attacks. Quantum computing provides all the horsepower such techniques need, meaning that these standards will be wide open.

PQChat is the first product to be based on SRD’s own patented NTS encryption. It can be used for authentication, banking tokens and digital rights management; as well as becoming a new encryption standard replacing RSA and Elliptic Curve. To avoid any possible attacker detecting patterns in a user’s messages, NTS randomises messages’ appearance. Regardless of content, every time you encrypt the same message the output will be completely different: making messages incomprehensible to everyone except the intended recipient. As a result, PQChat is as future-proof as possible.

Other features include:

Minimal user information: Most communication tools require users to share a large amount of personal information. PQChat only stores a one-way encrypted value of the user’s phone number, which cannot be reconstructed, plus an encrypted user-supplied nickname and pseudo ID image; making the user’s identity impossible to determine.

User-defined passwords: PQChat allows users to set their own Master Password to sign up to the service, as well as a 5-digit alphanumeric PIN. PQChat does not even store the Master Password in the app, meaning that users have complete control over their own security.

Video and Voice authentication: To ensure a message recipient is who they claim to be, PQChat uses SRD’s patented Man At The End (MATE) authentication. By providing a video and audio authentication message, users can be certain of each others’ identity.

Locker: To guarantee that important information isn’t lost, PQChat includes a secure locker where users can store information that they want to guarantee it is kept safe and private.

Complete control over messages: As well as sending, users can remotely delete messages, whether manually or after a particular length of time. Users can also be sent an acknowledgement to provide a guarantee that crucial messages have been seen and read.

“Even if an application or service claims to be secure, the data it holds still represents a risk,” continued Andersen Cheng. “For example, if an application stores personal details then a security breach can put all users at risk. Apart from having zero knowledge of any message contents, SRD Wireless vows not to obtain, store or share any personal details or password information from PQChat users: it is our belief that ultimately your security should be in your hands, not ours. Since SRD’s business model is based around selling solutions to enterprises rather than data mining, there is no need for us to hold any of this information. Quite simply, if we cannot guarantee this trust between us and our users, then all of our claims about the security of PQChat itself are worthless.”

As well as consumers and workers using PQChat to send secure, private messages, SRD can provide custom applications to suit specific enterprise needs. For example, the legal, healthcare and financial services industries all have a need to support confidential, secure messaging across and between businesses. Whether sharing case notes, patient records or M&A details, SRD and PQChat can give the level of privacy, confidentiality and compliance that these industries demand.