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 president, 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 monitor any movement, sound or disturbance in your phone's surroundings.
Leave the app running in your hotel room, for example, and it will take pictures or record the sound of anyone entering the room while you're out and about. It can then instantly send photos and audio clips of these visitors to your main phone, alerting you to any intrusion into your environment. The app even uses the phone's light sensor to trigger alerts if the light or a flashlight in the room goes off or on.
"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 tools ασφάλειας. Τα projects της ομάδας μέχρι σήμερα είναι λογισμικό ασφαλείας, κρυπτογράφησης και ανίχνευσης κακόβουλου λογισμικού.
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 one smartphone like device security," says 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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