Messaging app developers offer £10,000 cash prize to hackers who can intercept a message

By on Monday, April 29, 2013

redact secure messenger app

To promote its messaging app – described as the ‘world’s first totally secure instant messenger application’ – Shoreditch-based Redact is offering a £10,000 prize to anyone who can intercept a message.

The developers have also chosen to promote the £3.99 iOS app by offering it to MPs and FTSE 500 CEOs for free, in what’s a nice PR touch to perhaps highlight how both parties have failed to keep correspondence confidential in the past.

Here’s the introductory message on the company’s challenge page, laying down the media-friendly gauntlet:

We’re confident that the messages you send via the Redact app are completely secure. To prove it, we are offering a standing reward of £10,000 to anyone who has the skills to intercept and decrypt a challenge message, which constantly bounces between two phones in our challenge location. We’ll even give you a head start and tell you the location of the phones.

As pointed out in the source detailed below, ‘unlike BBM and iMessage, Redact doesn’t have any servers‘, meaning the better-than-military grade encription’ of Redact is likely, according to security experts, the real deal.

The stunt is similar to Google’s (obviously more remunerative) cash prize challenges, the last of which dangled an ubergeeky $3.14159m prize fund in front of hackers to spot vulnerabilities in its Chrome operating system running on Samsung Chromebooks, but Redact’s effort is a nice way to highlight its core product, nonetheless.

Source: Willard Foxton‘s Telegraph technology blog here

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