Open Source Encryption for everybody

This is a guest post provided by the team from BlockPRISM.org site: Stefan, Felix, Carolyn and Thomas

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With an increasing importance placed on communication via social media, privacy is imperative now more than ever over the Internet. The NSA scandal has shown that there is a great demand for secure communication on the Internet. However, many people do not try to protect their privacy by any means either because encryption is difficult to implement in social media or simply because they are unaware of the resources out there for encryption. Encryption needs to be made easily available for everyone so that privacy is no longer a concern.

That’s where BlockPrism comes in. BlockPrism is a non-profit organisation that works on the encryption plugin with the same name.

BlockPrism plugin encrypts messages in social networks and keeps your data yours. Our idea is to provide transparent free open source plug-ins and tools that let you communicate safely over the media you already use, in a simple way.

Once the plug-in is installed, messages can be sent to friends as they were before. However, when you now message a friend that has the plug-in installed as well, the message is encrypted before it leaves your browser and is decrypted in your friend’s browser before it is displayed to him or her.

We use a strong and proven public private key encryption for our system. Your message is encrypted with your friend's public key in your browser. The message can only be decrypted using your friend's private key. This private key is securely stored in your friend's browser so no one but him or her can access it.

Right now we have a Chrome browser plugin, which can be found at blockprism.org. We are working on Chromium, Firefox and Opera ports. The proof of concept can be seen working in Facebook Chat here (video).

An indiegogo campaign has also been launched to support progress. We launched the campaign to get help to finalize the browser plugin, give smartphone support , and provide support to other messaging services besides Facebook.

Our vision is to provide a simple means of encrypting messages for everybody. If you are interested, check us out and read more about the encryption process at blockprism.org

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