Chelsea Manning joins Nym as security consultant to audit their code for vulnerability

Whistleblower and former member of the US armed forces Chelsea Manning is joining Nym, an open-source, decentralized, permissionless and incentivized system providing full-stack privacy, to help prevent mass surveillance by auditing their cutting-edge code for privacy and security vulnerabilities, Invezz learned from a press release. The audit will take place pending the Nym network’s accession to the main net later this year.   

Few people are as aware of the critical consequences a software breach can have as Manning, who was in prison for almost seven years for leaking documentation from military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was pardoned by Barack Obama.

On a mission to resist surveillance by detecting privacy leaks

Due to Manning’s background in signals intelligence and experiences with repression, she’s uniquely qualified to understand how strong adversaries can attack Nym users. She will be helping Nym resist surveillance via discovering new privacy leaks and setting parameters for cover traffic over the next few months. Cover traffic is “fake traffic” sent by Nym to confuse an adversary, like a cell phone operator or a malicious ISP.

Privacy is making a massive comeback

Due to new regulations like the GDPR and user demand, privacy is becoming popular again. For example, private messaging app Signal was downloaded over 100 million times in May of this year alone. At the moment, no organization except Nym promises (and guarantees) metadata protection at the network layer.

Harry Halpin, CEO of Nym, says:

Chelsea Manning is not only a whistleblower, but also a talented security and privacy engineer. The battle for privacy doesn’t end with cryptographic bugs, which are what most auditors focus on. No security audits have ever dealt with traffic analysis attacks of the magnitude of those Nym is meant to prevent.

Chelsea Manning states: