Betrusted Software

I am thrilled to announce that I will be collaborating with bunnie and xobs on the betrusted project with a focus on software.

Betrusted aims to provide a user verifiable, trustworthy device for secure communications. That's why the device is intentionally limited in functionality.

This means that Betrusted is not a "smartphone": it can’t browse the web; it has no “app store”; it won’t hail rides for you; and it can’t help you navigate a city. However, it will be able to keep your private conversations private, give you a solid second factor for authentication, and perhaps provide a safe spot to store digital currency.

Betrusted software is the application project companion for the Betrusted hardware device. Going beyond just end-to-end encryption the Betrusted project ensures that Human-Computer Interaction is also secure from key loggers and screen grabbers. The software will include an input method editor to facilitate entering text in both Latin (French Azerty keyboard layout shown above) and Asian languages as well as a graphics toolkit for the ultra low power display. This project will develop a secure messaging application on top of these input/output libraries while meeting the constraint that all software must fit in an extraordinarily small memory footprint (4 MiB RAM).

Later today in Leipzig at the 36th Chaos Communication Congress bunnie will present Open Source is Insufficient to Solve Trust Problems in Hardware.

Stay tuned for further updates on the Betrusted hardware, OS and software projects.

The Betrusted Software project is made possible with financial support from NLnet and the NG10 Privacy & Trust Enhancing Technologies Fund.