Haven: To help safeguard digital security, one of the world's most prominent activists against digital surveillance has released a cheap, mobile physical security application.
On Friday, the Freedom Press Foundation (Freedom of the Press Foundation) and its chairman, Edward Snowden, released Haven, an app designed to turn any Android phone into a kind of general-purpose sensor for detecting any intrusion.
Haven uses your phone's sensors to monitor changes in sound, light and motion.
The app is designed to be installed on every Android. Haven uses your phone's cameras, microphones, and even accelerometers to track any movement, sound, or disturbance in the environment it's in. phone you.
Let the app run in your hotel room, for example, and take photos or record the sound of anyone coming into the room while you're out somewhere. Then, it can instantly send photos and sound clips of these visitors to your main phone, alerting you to any interference with your environment. The application even uses the phone light sensor to trigger alerts if the light or a flashlight is turned off or on in the room.
"Imagine having a guard dog that you can take with you to any hotel, and leave it in your room when you are not there. "He's really smart, he's watching everything that happens and he's recording it," Snowden told WIRED in an encrypted phone call from Moscow.
"The idea is to be able to trust natural spaces."
Since becoming director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation in early 2016, Snowden has built a small team of developers and technologists working on security tools. The group's projects to date are security software, encryption and malware detection.
The idea of a smartphone-based alarm system arose when Micah Lee, a technology expert at The Intercept news agency and a member of the board of the Freedom Press Foundation, suggested it to Snowden at the beginning of 2017.
Lee was hoping for a new approach to a multi-year problem with the cyber-security community: It's very difficult to prevent someone with physical access to your computer.
Eventually, the Lee and Snowden developer team at Freedom of the Press Foundation worked with the nonprofit Guardian Project to create and test a software solution on this problem.
"We thought there was a way to use a smartphone as a security device," said Nathan Freitas, director of the Guardian Project.
In practice, the Haven app could protect its users, in addition to hackers seeking physical access to a device, from jealous spouses, thieves or even spies, if you watch a lot of spy movies…
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