schmoose (pronounced like “moose” and written with a lower-case “s” in its name) is a new messaging app that is now available for Windows Phone and coming soon to other platforms. The application is the latest in a new trend of apps that hope to keep snoopers — whether they’re an obsessive ex or a government entity — out of your personal conversations.
schmoose uses open standard technology for end-to-end encryption (AES-256, SHA-256, RSA with key size of 2048 bits) to help its users’ stay private. With the OpenPGP standard in place, schmoose provides the ready environment for you to conduct “truly private communication”. Data is only exchanged using a secure line (128-bit TLS 1.2). Not even schmoose themselves have access to user messages, which will prevent governments from being able to obtain access from the developer in a similar fashion as Viber.
“…messages are still kept private, even if someone listens to the message traffic and tries to [decrypt the messages]”
“Your messages are still kept private, even if someone listens to the message traffic and tries to understand (i.e. decrypt) what’s going over the wire,” the app’s website states. “schmoose relies on transport layer encryption as well as message level encryption in order to provide a high degree of privacy to its users.”
When starting the app for the first time, you need to enter either a valid email address or a phone number that is able to receive text messages (yes, even those Google Voice or TextMe numbers should work). schmoose will have already “created a public/private key pair on your device” and your data will be encrypted and signed before being sent to schmoose’s servers.
We’ve just downloaded the app ourselves and so haven’t had much time to spend with it yet. If you want to keep your conversations private, you may want to download the app for yourself via the Windows Phone Store. We’ve contacted the company to see if we can nail down the launch date of the app for other platforms.