What is GoodCrypto's design?

Transparent protection for whole groups at a time.

Our guiding principles are:

• Protect everyone at once

  No training. No clicks.

  Bruce Schneier points out, "If there is anything PGP has taught us, it's that one click is one click too many." Protecting one person at a time is inefficient. You have to try to train each one to protect themselves. The success rate is not high.

  Most cracked systems are user systems because ordinary people have no idea how to protect themselves online.

• Layered protection

  For example, web access is filtered, aggregated by groups and protected by Tor. And, mail can be configured to use multiple encryption methods.

• Use tested and trusted components, such as GPG and Tor

  We are very slow to use new protection schemes until they have been audited and their reliability proven.

• Preconfigured distribution

  Just boot it. Preconfigured. Support. Security updates. Reproducible build.

• Decentralized

  All your private information is on your own server. Automatic key management with no central servers. P2P public key distribution. Key pinning.

• Integrate with existing mail and browsers

  Uses the same SMTP, IMAP, and POP servers you use now. Same mail clients and browsers. Same antispam and antivirus. Integrates at the MTA level.

• Don't use known compromised encryption

  This may seem obvious, but some compromised crypto is standard. State sponsored standards are generally crippled so the state can crack them, which of course means others can crack them.

• Don't trust too much

  That includes us. Encourage people to audit GoodCrypto. The goal is to be tested and trusted, not blindly trusted.

• Virtualization to protect against embedded malware

  Ed Snowden says that VMs are "a big step up" against persistent threats. That matches our experience.