Friday, 26 July 2013

Send Your Secrets And Let it Self Destruct the Mission Impossible Way


We all have seen Mission Impossible. Do you remember for every mission, Ethan Hunt takes up, he will be informed about the mission in a very unique way and at the end of the message it will say it will self-destruct? After that we see whatever medium that was used to communicate with Ethan Hunt blows up (Watch the video above for a clearer understanding). And we will be like WOW that’s awesome man. Well now you have a chance to do something similar like that just that it does not blows up. It shreds itself. This is a very interesting service (I think the first on the net) which is so easy, does not require any registration or logins and you can send an encrypted self-destructive note in 30 seconds. Cool huh? Let’s see what it is.

This service is called NoteShred. Well basically this service is a messaging service that sends a note to any recipient of your choice. The plus point of this service is they are focused on how to secure the note that you will be sending. Below is the flow chart on how your message is being sent.

So once you have sent the message to the intended recipient, your recipient will receive an email in the inbox. They will be provided a link and once they click it, they will be prompted to enter the password that you set during creation of the note. However, you need to share the password with the recipient (In a secured way). So once he / she entered the right password, they can read the message. That’s all it takes for you to send a message encrypted, hashed, salted and self-destructive. The beauty of this note is if you set the self-destruct duration as “After Reading” it will destruct itself once the recipient reads it for the first time. And if the recipient clicks on the link in his email again, it will show that the note has been shredded. Cool stuff and trust me you will never think security can be as simple as 30 seconds.

So you may ask, “Dude, why would I want to send this kind of things when I have an email?” My answer is “Buddy, you know about PRISM and you know they are watching your email. In case you want to rob a bank and want to send the plan to your friend, which one would you prefer? Sending it through email and get busted or send in a simple secure way that will self-destruct like shown in the Mission Impossible movie?”. Well I am not at all condoning those who want to rob a bank to use this service but there are many usages of this service as it is written in their website. You can read it here for yourself and I do not want to spoil the fun.

The security features of the notes is also quite impressive. As said, layered security is the best security practice, they are also practicing the same thing. As I have read, they will has your message and encrypt it with AES 256 bits algorithm. I feel it is Okay secure as long as the password used to secure the note is strong enough. If you use admin1234 as the password, you might as well send it through a normal email =D. They also have lockout mechanism for password trials, SSL securities and short life server side session cookies. In a nutshell what I can say it, it’s pretty secure and if you want to know more about it, click here.

So, my final thoughts. I think this is a great idea for a quick secured way of sending a message to whoever it is. It is simple to use, reliable and yes it really shreds your notes. So in case you want to send a password protected ZIP files password to your friend in a secure way, you can use this NoteShred service. They work really well. As it may not be the ultimate security solution for those users out there, at least they have made an effort to make security simple and start practicing the humans to be more security conscious when they are transferring data over the Internet. Do try it guys. I like this service very much. Thumbs up NoteShred Security. 

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