RedPhone
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| Abbreviation | OWS |
|---|---|
| Formation | January 21, 2013 |
| Founder | Moxie Marlinspike |
| Purpose | Software development |
| Location | |
| Products | Signal, |
| Fields | Free and open-source software, Cryptography, Mobile software |
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Staff
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3 |
| Website | whispersystems |
Open Whisper Systems (informally abbreviated OWS) is a software organization that was founded by Moxie Marlinspike in 2013. Its main focus is the development of the . It also maintains an encrypted communications application called Signal. The organization is funded by a combination of donations and grants, and all of its products are published as free and open-source software.
Security researcher Moxie Marlinspike and roboticist Stuart Anderson co-founded a startup company called Whisper Systems in 2010. The company produced proprietary enterprise mobile security software. Among these were an encrypted texting program called TextSecure and an encrypted voice calling app called RedPhone. They also developed a firewall and tools for encrypting other forms of data.
In November 2011, Whisper Systems announced that it had been acquired by Twitter. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by either company. The acquisition was done "primarily so that Mr. Marlinspike could help the then-startup improve its security". Shortly after the acquisition, Whisper Systems' RedPhone service was made unavailable. Some criticized the removal, arguing that the software was "specifically targeted [to help] people under repressive regimes" and that it left people like the Egyptians in "a dangerous position" during the events of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Twitter released TextSecure as free and open-source software under the GPLv3 license in December 2011. RedPhone was also released under the same license in July 2012. Marlinspike later left Twitter and founded Open Whisper Systems as a collaborative open source project for the continued development of TextSecure and RedPhone.
Marlinspike launched Open Whisper Systems' website in January 2013.
In February 2014, Open Whisper Systems introduced the second version of their TextSecure Protocol (now ), which added end-to-end encrypted group chat and instant messaging capabilities to TextSecure. Toward the end of July 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced plans to unify its RedPhone and TextSecure applications as Signal. These announcements coincided with the initial release of Signal as a RedPhone counterpart for iOS. The developers said that their next steps would be to provide TextSecure instant messaging capabilities for iOS, unify the RedPhone and TextSecure applications on Android, and launch a web client. Signal was the first iOS app to enable easy, strongly encrypted voice calls for free. TextSecure compatibility was added to the iOS application in March 2015.
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