Silent Circle (software)
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| Founded | October 2011 |
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| Headquarters | Le Grand-Saconnex, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland (legal domicile) |
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| Website | www |
Silent Circle is an encrypted communications firm based in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. Silent Circle provides multiplatform secure communication services for mobile devices and desktop. Launched October 16, 2012, the company operates under a subscription business model. The encryption part of the software used is free software/open source and peer-reviewed. For the remaining parts of Silent Phone and Silent Text, the source code is available on GitHub, but under proprietary software licences.
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 Nevis, but moved its headquarters to Geneva, Switzerland in 2014 in search of 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 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 November 2014, Silent Phone and Silent Text received top scores on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard, along with "ChatSecure + Orbot", , TextSecure, and "Signal / RedPhone". They received points for having communications encrypted in transit, having communications encrypted with keys 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.
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