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Secure Messaging
Browse Attomus insight related to secure messaging, with a focus on programme delivery, operational judgement, and professional execution in demanding environments.
Metadata: The Half of Privacy That Encryption Doesn't Cover
Michael Hayden – the only person to have run both the NSA and the CIA – told a 2014 debate at Johns Hopkins, “We kill people based on metadata.” The line was not a boast about breaking encryption. It was the opposite point: for a great many purposes, nobody needs to. The earlier posts in this series looked at what encryption guarantees, and at who holds the keys. This one concerns everything those guarantees leave exposed: the data about the data. Who communicated with whom. When, how often, in what bursts, from which locations, on which devices, in messages of what size. Content encryption – even flawless, end-to-end, key-custody-correct encryption – conceals none of it.
Read articleWhat End-to-End Encryption Actually Guarantees — and What It Quietly Doesn't
Few phrases in technology have travelled as far from their technical meaning as “end-to-end encrypted”. It now appears on platforms whose architectures differ so fundamentally that the shared label conveys almost nothing. For an organisation deciding where its sensitive communication should live, the label is the start of the inquiry, not the end of it. This post sets out, as precisely as a general audience allows, what end-to-end encryption guarantees, the conditions attached to that guarantee, and the substantial ground it does not cover.
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