PrivateSky

» see privatesky.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

PrivateSky was a British encrypted messaging and file transfer service, built by a London company called CertiVox and sold on subscription. It ran in the browser and bolted into Outlook, and its pitch was the ordinary one for its moment: your mail should be unreadable to everyone who is not holding the other end of the conversation. The product was live by 2011 and was still signing up customers at the start of 2013.

Towards the end of 2012 CertiVox heard from the National Technical Assistance Centre, a division of GCHQ that acts as a liaison with the Home Office. NTAC wanted the keys that would decrypt customer data. Brian Spector, the company's chief executive, later described the position as a choice between two engineering budgets: keep an architecture that CertiVox itself could not read, or spend around £500,000 building the interception capability that would hand traffic to GCHQ and the NSA.

CertiVox took a third option and closed the service. No announcement went out, and no transfer offer followed it. For a Turkish customer the product had never been within reach anyway, because PrivateSky sold into British business accounts and was priced in pounds, so the only trace of it here is a company that stopped answering.

~ the case file ~

~ the ask ~

What NTAC wanted was not a password. PrivateSky held key material on behalf of its customers, which is the normal cost of making encrypted mail usable by people who will lose a private key the first week they own one. That custody is also a lever. If the operator can recover a user's data, then a government can ask the operator, and the question stops being mathematical and becomes a question about a company's balance sheet.

This was not a seizure. It was a request with a price attached, and the price was high enough to settle the matter. Spector put the backdoor at roughly half a million pounds, against a product that had been selling for about a year, and the service was switched off rather than rebuilt to be readable.

~ what they chose ~

CertiVox kept a copy of PrivateSky running for its own internal use and took the lesson into its next product. The company's M-Pin technology split the root key so that the operator held one half and the user held the other, which removes the ability to comply with the request that had just closed PrivateSky. CertiVox renamed itself MIRACL in 2015 and went on selling cryptography to other companies rather than mail to end users.

~ eleven months of silence ~

The archive is unusually blunt about how quietly this happened. The last capture of privatesky.me, taken on 26 January 2013, is a working sales page. It offers free end to end encrypted messaging and invites you to compare the subscription packages, with no hint anywhere on it that the service was ending. By May 2014 the same host answers 404.

The reason nobody noticed in January was that nobody was told. The account only became public in December 2013, after a year in which Edward Snowden had made the subject urgent, when Spector explained to a security trade publication what the choice had been. A service can die without a death notice, and the only honest record left is a cached page still trying to sell you a year's subscription.

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