I feel like the reasons for creating something like Crypton are self-evident, but that’s probably only true for people who are familiar with encryption technology or who understand the risks of deligating responsibility for your privacy to others.
So instead of assuming, I thought I’d talk about some of the reasons I’m motivated to work on Crypton.
I want to make it impossible for users privacy to be violated because someone gains control over my server. This could be a nefarious hacker, a government agency, or it could simply be a programming mistake.
By encrypting everything before it is sent to the server, and by only decrypting it after it’s delivered to the user’s computer, the only thing a hacker or cop can get from the server is unreadable encrypted data.
Other services claim to store user data securely, but they generally have access to the keys necisary to decrypt the data. In Crypton, the user supplies the encryption keys, and they are never sent to the server. This means the user has complete control (and also responsibility) when it comes to their encryption keys.
Another reason I want to build Crypton is because existing encryption systems are designed for one-on-one communication, and I think there is a lot of value in the ability for groups to interact privately.
By automating the process of encrypting and sharing messages with a trusted group, Crypton provides the convenience, sharing and collaboration environment of a social network with the strong privacy only public-key encryption can provide.
Another interesting side-effect of the Crypton architecture is that most of the compute-intensive operations are handled by the client. This means that it’s possible to support more users per server than in other systems. I’d like to combine this along with my current studies in “big data” architecture to design Crypton to have the ability to scale affordably.
I don’t expect most people to start using Crypton right away, and I’m deliberately designing the initial versions to require users who are familiar with public-key encryption. I think it is possible to grow the system into something that could be used by a more general audience, but it’s more important to me to make sure that it serves people well who need something like it today, and once that’s perfect we can move on to mass appeal.