End to end encrypted messaging without sacrificing your identity, and that's just the start of this story.
We're excited to announce our Obsidian Secure Messenger (OSM) Beta Release is live! The current release is v0.9. Continue to follow @ObsidianCrypto or our official blog for updates!
The Obsidian Secure Messanger, or OSM, started with a very typical problem in the communication industry. When creating an account for your favorite chat service, you often need to sacrifice some sort of personal information about yourself such as an email or mobile number in order to use their service.
This might not seem like a problem as you may be used to giving up information about yourself in day to day transactions. You might not think twice when you're confronted by a checkbox which waives your privacy.
What you may not realize however, is that you just created a link between your online actions and a piece of Personally Identifiable Information, or PII. The Obsidian Platform and The Obsidian Secure Messenger will focus on ensuring that the power and control of your information and privacy is put back into your hands once again.
The Obsidian Secure Messenger was built from the ground up to focus on state-of-the art applied cryptography to give an edge over currently feasible and future attacks. The OSM also does not require any PII that could compromise your identity and all text messages are encrypted end to end ensuring complete protection from middleware attacks.
The end goal of the OSM is to run on a global network of decentralised Obsidian Messaging nodes which will be coupled to the Obsidian Network making it difficult to be targeted by bad actors.
We're currently working on an application specific Whitepaper for the OSM which will go into granular detail about encryption standards used, and the problems the OSM is working to solve. Please follow our social channels for updates.
In our planned Beta Release for the OSM, the following features and functionality will be available immediately:
Beta Release Notes:
While the OSM beta will be released to the public, certain features may not be guarenteed to work all the time as the team will be constantly working to improve functionality. New features will be added overtime to the list above and will be marked as such.
1 - Localized encryption of media files such as photos are currently unavailable. Text messages are still encrypted end-to-end however.
Aside from the current supported features for the OSM Beta, we are planning to incorporate various authenticated third-party services to run alongside the messenger application such as:
Download the latest OSM Beta APK v0.9-5 below! To install you will need to allow installation from Unknown Sources which can be found under Settings >> Security.
Help setting up a new OSM Identity? We have created a short Onboarding Video to show the process of setting up an OSM Identity.
Download/Install issues? Please reach out to us via twitter @ObsidianCrypto and we'll get back to you as soon as we can!
OSM Bugs/Features? Start the conversation with us through our Github Issue panel, or on our Discord Community chat. Please be as detailed as possible and include the make/model/year of your device when reporting an issue.
We are planning for a Beta release for iOS in Q1 2018. Please follow our social channels for continuous updates in this market.
We have already released an Alpha version of the OSM for Windows 10. We are planning to update it to Beta to keep in line with updates done for the Android Beta release by Q1 2018.
Please visit our Github OSMAlpha Repo for more information and to install.