Privacy Tools: The Best Encrypted Messaging Programs

It is not easy to sort out which secret messaging tools offer true security and which ones might be snake oil. So I turned to two experts -- Joseph Bonneau at Princeton and Peter Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- for advice about what to look for in encryption tools.

Working together, we chose seven technical criteria on which to rank encryption tools. The criteria aim to assess whether the tool is designed to combat threats such as backdoors secretly built into the software, Internet eavesdroppers, or tricksters who steal the secret "keys" that users must safeguard to keep their communications secure. Check out the results of our review.