Major names in tech including Google and Dropbox have joined the Open Technology Fund to launch a project aimed at making security and privacy tools more accessible and easy to use. The initiative is called Simply Secure, and will gather researchers and developers who will try to identify usability problems in open-source security tools.
PCWorld notes some of the names associated with the project:
The organization’s advisory board includes Google Security Engineer and Apache Software Foundation co-founder Ben Laurie; cryptographer and University of Waterloo professor Ian Goldberg, who designed the Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR) protocol; and Wendy Seltzer, the policy counsel for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The increasing number of large data breaches and the mass Internet surveillance revelations of the past year have generated a greater demand for secure communication tools. As a result, many developers have set out to create encrypted messaging and voice applications, encrypted email services, online anonymity tools and more.
Google's blog post reads:
There are already many credible and exciting software-development efforts that aim to make privacy and security ubiquitous. Rather than create redundant initiatives, we will focus on supporting existing open source work by providing usability and development expertise, direct ties to user communities, connections to funding sources, and other resources.
To build trust and ensure quality outcomes, one core component of our work will be public audits of interfaces and code. This will help validate the security and usability claims of the efforts we support.
More generally, we aim to take a page from the open-source community and make as much of our work transparent and widely-accessible as possible. This means that as we get into the nitty-gritty of learning how to build collaborations around usably secure software, we will share our developing methodologies and expertise publicly. Over time, this will build a body of community resources that will allow all projects in this space to become more usable and more secure.
