“The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.” — Dr. Whitfield Diffie, co-creator of public key cryptography and advisor to NKN
Executive Summary
- nMobile is an extra secure and trusted chat app, available on iOS and Android today.
- Why nMobile? To eradicate the roots of security hacks and privacy issues of popular chat apps such as whatsapp and signal, by removing all centralized servers.
- Targeted audience: people who put highest priority on security and privacy, such as crypto community, minority groups, and financial/legal/health professionals.
- Why is it better? nMobile runs on dataRide, a blockchain powered distributed communication system by over 20,000 independent, open source and community run relay servers.
The Never-ending security crisis and the Call for trusted communication
On Friday 31st of July, a group of hackers compromised Twitter and gained access to 130 accounts including those of Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk. These breaches often put your data, your family’s data, your employer’s data, and sometimes even your city, state, or federal governments data at risk. The more we rely on digital communication platforms due to the pandemic, the more crucial security and privacy matters.
Signal or WhatsApp were originally created to meet the demand for a secure chat option. They offer a relatively secure platform where rich text messages could be sent and received between individuals and public/private groups. These applications grant end to end encryption, ensuring big improvements in messaging security at the time they were released.
However, today we need even more secure communication. Applications such as Signal and WhatsApp are no longer enough to protect our private data. With their infrastructures relying on a centralized database, they are more susceptible to large scale attacks; by using cell-phone numbers as identity, their system is very vulnerable to SIM swap attacks; furthermore, your private key might be stored in a centralized server of these Apps.
We can definitely communicate securely and keep our data private. But it’s going to take a new generation of platforms and services to make it happen. That is why we created nMobile.
The Trusted Chat
nMobile solves these security issues by being a truly decentralized and distributed application. Instead of “don’t be evil”, nMobile “can’t be evil”. In order to accomplish this, we eliminated the possibility of security and privacy breaches by removing centralized servers entirely. This means that
- There is no centralized server hosted by any company or individual.
- All your data is stored on your device and never in the cloud.
- Your private key is only stored on your local device, and never “backed up” in the cloud.
- All data is end-to-end encrypted and never accessible by any relay node in transit.
- No surveillance, no “big brother”.
So only you, and you alone, can read the messages intended for you.
The ultimate secure communication powered by dataRide
The secure and free nature of nMobile almost seems too good to be true. However, it’s built on a solid foundation as the whole network is powered by NKN’s dataRide platform, a distributed architecture with over 20,000 independent relay servers in 40+ countries worldwide that makes it nearly impossible for a malicious party to take down the network. And below are some key blockchain technologies that dataRide employs to power nMobile.
- dataRide is enabled natively on all NKN full node mainnet software and takes advantage of a novel consensus we call Proof of Relay, a useful Proof of Work. Miners who run the software and relay traffic have an opportunity to earn rewards.
- dataRide enables true peer to peer data communication which uses NKN’s unique and global IDs ensured by the underlying blockchain technology, allowing communication between devices, even if these devices don’t have a public IP address on the internet
- dataRide offers payment channels between peers, for direct payment for services using NKN token and Blockchain accounting.
A brighter future with trust
We believe nMobile is the future of secure communications. By offering secure communications that incorporate end-to-end encryption along with strict local storage of private keys and a distributed architecture, users can feel safe in sharing information with their friends, family, coworkers, and business partners again.
Try nMobile today and rest assured your data will stay private and secure! Download and install on iOS and Android today!
Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nmobile/id1499487381
Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nkn.mobile.app
Product demo video: https://youtu.be/bDh7CUvnqW0
Bug report and feature suggestions: https://forum.nkn.org/t/nmobile-1-0-community-feedback/2344