Chelsea Manning joins Nym as security consultant to audit their code for vulnerability

2021-8-27 18:07

Whistleblower and former member of the US armed forces Chelsea Manning is joining Nym, an open-source, decentralized, permissionless and incentivized system providing full-stack privacy, to help prevent mass surveillance by auditing their cutting-edge code for privacy and security vulnerabilities, Invezz learned from a press release. The audit will take place pending the Nym network’s accession to the main net later this year.

Few people are as aware of the critical consequences a software breach can have as Manning, who was in prison for almost seven years for leaking documentation from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was pardoned by Barack Obama.

On a mission to resist surveillance by detecting privacy leaks

Due to Manning’s background in signals intelligence and experiences with repression, she’s uniquely qualified to understand how strong adversaries can attack Nym users. She will be helping Nym resist surveillance via discovering new privacy leaks and setting parameters for cover traffic over the next few months. Cover traffic is “fake traffic” sent by Nym to confuse an adversary, like a cell phone operator or a malicious ISP.

Privacy is making a massive comeback

Due to new regulations like the GDPR and user demand, privacy is becoming popular again. For example, private messaging app Signal was downloaded over 100 million times in May of this year alone. At the moment, no organization except Nym promises (and guarantees) metadata protection at the network layer.

Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym, says:

“While trusting software with their money is one thing people are learning to do with Bitcoin (BTC/USD) and DeFi, brave whistleblowers and revolutionaries like Chelsea Manning have to trust software with their lives. So rather than ‘YOLO’ and launch as only to wreck their users, we’re working with the best people alive to keep our users safe and secure. While all software has bugs, people that launch software that endangers their users or doesn’t even work are scammers that could even have blood on their hands.”

Chelsea Manning is not only a whistleblower, but also a talented security and privacy engineer. The battle for privacy doesn’t end with cryptographic bugs, which are what most auditors focus on. No security audits have ever dealt with traffic analysis attacks of the magnitude of those Nym is meant to prevent.

Chelsea Manning states:

“As methods for network traffic analysis have dramatically improved in the last decade, I have frequently called for research (since 2016) into alternative methods to Tor that avoid exposing the data within the network to such analysis. Nym is one such viable alternative worthy of research, and developmental implementation.”

The post Chelsea Manning joins Nym as security consultant to audit their code for vulnerability appeared first on Invezz.

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