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18-532: In November 2011, Mike Janke called Phil Zimmermann with an idea for a new kind of private, secure version of Skype . Zimmermann agreed to the project and called Jon Callas , co-founder of PGP Corporation and Vincent Moscaritolo. Janke brought in security expert Vic Hyder, and the founding team was established. The company was founded in the Caribbean island of Nevis , but moved its headquarters to Le Grand-Saconnex near Geneva, Switzerland in 2014 in search of

36-654: A software engineer on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign as a military policy analyst . From 2016 to 2021, he worked at Delft University of Technology as an Associate Professor in the Cybersecurity section at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science. In 1991, he wrote the popular Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) program, and made it available (together with its source code) through public FTP for download,

54-520: A country with "stronger privacy laws to protect its customers' information." On August 9, 2013, through their website, Silent Circle announced that the Silent Mail service would be shut down, because the company could "see the writing on the wall" and felt it was not possible to sufficiently secure email data with the looming threat of government compulsion and precedent set by the Lavabit shutdown

72-1017: A threat to democracy and privacy, because of their profit-oriented revenue models that "are all about exploiting our personal information" and "[deepen] the political divides in our culture", and hoped Okuna would help solve these problems. In 2013, an article on "Zimmermann's Law" quoted Phil Zimmermann as saying "The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier", and "the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months", in reference to Moore's law . Zimmermann has received numerous technical and humanitarian awards for his pioneering work in cryptography : Simon Singh 's The Code Book devotes an entire chapter to Zimmermann and PGP. In 2022 Steven Johnson covered his story and achievements in Zimmermann's profile for Hidden Heroes - The Crypto Wars: How Philip Zimmermann Fought for Our Right to Privacy. VoIP Too Many Requests If you report this error to

90-497: The Dark Mail Alliance . The goal of the organization is to work on a new protocol to replace PGP that will encrypt email metadata, among other things that PGP is not capable of. Zimmermann was also involved in the social network Okuna , formerly Openbook, which aimed to be an ethical and privacy-friendly alternative to existing social networks, especially Facebook . He sees today's established social media platforms as

108-483: The United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP. In 1995, Zimmermann published the book PGP Source Code and Internals as a way to bypass limitations on exporting digital code. Zimmermann's introduction says

126-548: The book contains "all of the C source code to a software package called PGP" and that the unusual publication in book form of the complete source code for a computer program was a direct response to the U.S. government's criminal investigation of Zimmermann for violations of U.S. export restrictions as a result of the international spread of PGP's use. After the government dropped its case without indictment in early 1996, Zimmermann founded PGP Inc. and released an updated version of PGP and some additional related products. That company

144-558: The day before. In January 2015, Silent Text had a serious vulnerability that allowed an attacker to remotely take control of a Blackphone device. A potential attacker only needed to know the target’s Silent Circle ID number or phone number. Blackphone and Silent Circle patched the vulnerability shortly after it had been disclosed. In March 2015 there was a controversy when Information Security specialist and hacker Khalil Sehnaoui identified that Silent Circle's warrant canary had been removed from their site. In January 2017 Gregg Smith

162-477: The first widely available program implementing public-key cryptography . Shortly thereafter, it became available overseas via the Internet, though Zimmermann has said he had no part in its distribution outside the United States. The very first version of PGP included an encryption algorithm, BassOmatic , developed by Zimmermann. After a report from RSA Security , who were in a licensing dispute with regard to

180-416: The page for the secure messaging scorecard states that it is out of date and should not be used in privacy- and security-related decision-making. The company's products enable encrypted mobile phone calls, text messaging, and video chat. Its current products include the following: Its discontinued products include the following: Silent Circle Instant Message Protocol (SCIMP) was an encryption scheme that

198-412: The providers don't have access to ( end-to-end encryption ), making it possible for users to independently verify their correspondent's identities, having past communications secure if the keys are stolen ( forward secrecy ), having their code open to independent review ( open source ), having their security designs well-documented, and having recent independent security audits. However, as of August 2020,

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216-506: The same time, Silent Circle transitioned to using a protocol that uses the Double Ratchet Algorithm instead of SCIMP. The company is privately funded and operates under a subscription business model . Phil Zimmermann Philip R. Zimmermann (born 1954) is an American computer scientist and cryptographer . He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in

234-660: The use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act . The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls . At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from

252-645: The world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone . Zimmermann is co-founder and Chief Scientist of the global encrypted communications firm Silent Circle . He was born in Camden, New Jersey . Zimmermann received a B.S. degree in computer science from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida in 1978. In the 1980s, Zimmermann worked in Boulder, Colorado as

270-479: Was a principal designer of the cryptographic key agreement protocol (the "association model") for the Wireless USB standard. Along with Mike Janke and Jon Callas , in 2012 he co-founded Silent Circle , a secure hardware and subscription based software security company. In October 2013, Zimmermann, along with other key employees from Silent Circle, teamed up with Lavabit founder Ladar Levison to create

288-581: Was acquired by Network Associates (NAI) in December 1997, and Zimmermann stayed on for three years as a Senior Fellow. NAI decided to drop the product line and in 2002, PGP was acquired from NAI by a new company called PGP Corporation . Zimmermann served as a special advisor and consultant to that firm until Symantec acquired PGP Corporation in 2010. Zimmermann is also a fellow at the Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society . He

306-524: Was developed by Vincent Moscaritolo. It enabled private conversation over instant message transports such as XMPP (Jabber). SCIMP provided encryption, perfect forward secrecy and message authentication. It also handled negotiating the shared secret keys. The protocol was used in Silent Text. Silent Text was discontinued on September 28, 2015, when its features were merged into Silent Circle's encrypted voice calling application called Silent Phone. At

324-783: Was named CEO with a renewed focus on serving the large business space as well as Government entities. At the same time Tony Cole, VP and Global Government CTO of FireEye , was named to the Board of Directors. Shortly after Smith became CEO, the company moved back from Switzerland to the United States. In November 2014, Silent Phone and Silent Text received top scores on the Electronic Frontier Foundation 's secure messaging scorecard, along with " ChatSecure + Orbot ", Cryptocat , TextSecure , and " Signal / RedPhone ". They received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having communications encrypted with keys

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