Want to stop the NSA from spying on your online activity? (I feel like I just got put on a watch list just by typing that sentence. We’re cool, right NSA? All friends here.) A firm founded in Hungary is claiming its “unhackable” system offers NSA-proof data storage, and is inviting hackers to try to break inside their systems or (virtually) die trying. Tech firm Tresorit, launched back in 2011 by a group of Budapest University grads, is offering a $25,000 reward to any hacker that can crack their systems or website.
Wild publicity stunt? Probably; there’s no question that their hacker challenge has given Tresorit a lot of new coverage. But as no one has claimed the $25,000 prize yet, their system either must be pretty good, or people just aren’t trying that hard.
The Hungarian company claims that its system offers secure cloud data, and gives their clients encryption keys so that they can do the encryption themselves instead of simply trusting the firm’s protection. The keys can be shared with others, if you’d like them to have access to your files.
According to a statement by company spokesman Szabolcs Nagy, the company itself only gets “data, and we can’t decrypt it. Our founders are very paranoid, they are very cryptographic guys. We don’t want you to trust us.”
Company has invited hackers from around the globe to crack its sytems
So essentially, Tresorit has launched a system designed specifically to stop anybody but you from accessing it, including government agencies and the technology’s own developers. The system is reportedly set up like the popular file-sharing program Dropbox, only with a huge increase in privacy. And for those of you out there questioning whether or not something like this will ever take off, please note that the company has apparently collected 100,000 users since its launch back in April.
The Tresorit system was designed in part to alleviate tech consumer concerns after the Snowden incident, when it was revealed that the US government spies on all of us as we browse the Internet…like a lot. (I hope you’re enjoying all those pictures of kittens and Tom Hiddleston’s face that I reblog daily on Tumblr, government). While other companies have developed systems that double user privacy, Tresorit is the first to resolutely claim it’s system is actually “unhackable.”
So far around 700 hackers from 49 different countries have tried to crack it, including students from MIT, Stanford, and Princeton. But nobody has been successful, and the challenge ends in spring of 2014.
Field experts like cryptology wizard David Evans, who also teaches computer science at the University of Virginia, seem to think that the challenge is less about security and more about publicity.
“If they really cared about doing a security assessment about their design they wouldn't be doing this kind of challenge,” Evans said. “The problem is that hiring someone good is going to cost a lot more than $25,000 and won’t get them any publicity.”
While a fine point, the fact remains that participating hackers have yet to crack the system. That makes this a pretty good publicity stunt for Tresorit, and probably makes it of interest to the NSA.
Source Discovery.com
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