MIMIR Blockchain Solutions, a technology start-up focused on developing easy-to-use blockchain accessibility tools, has announced the alpha release of Eth-Mail.
At a time when digital security is under scrutiny and on the minds of both consumers and enterprise, Eth-Mail, an Ethereum-based messaging protocol, is being introduced to ensure messages remain truly private between sender and receiver.
MIMIR firmly believes the marketplace is ready for Eth-Mail and supports the early vision of Eric Hughes, who stated in A Cypherpunk Manifesto:
“…my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees.”
The MIMIR team said:
“…With the boom in new Apps/DApps hitting the marketplace, we’ve seen complaints in the media about standard, encrypted messaging applications failing to live up to their promise. With all these new products coming to market, some companies avoid the work required to provide their consumers with certain protections, or they outright lie about those protections. As consumers, we deserve better, and we shouldn’t have to worry about how much trust we place in the secure messaging applications. One of the largest trust issues is that these applications still suffer from the key escrow problem, messaging servers ultimately still store your public keys. This means that a malicious server could misreport public keys to create a persistent “man in the middle” attack.”
“Leveraging the blockchain as a secure PKI (Public Key Infrastructure), we’ve completely removed the ability for any single entity to read your messages. We won’t know what you’re saying, we couldn’t read your messages even if we tried. For now, we do know the username of who you’re talking to, but in future iterations, this will be corrected. With the blockchain, we no longer need to keep track of your keys, and you know you’re talking to the correct party when using Eth-Mail.”
Eth-Mail also uses a work function similar to what Hashcash used several years ago to add a proof-of-work function to all messages. This added computation gives Eth-Mail the additional benefit of being spam-resistant.
MIMIR Blockchain Solutions CTO, Hunter Prendergast, “All we need to know is that you have a message that needs delivered.”
Eth-Mail is currently available on the Ropsten Testnet. However, the team plans to move to the Mainnet in the near future. MMIR says any account created will be erased when migrated to the Mainnet. MIMIR will be offering a bug bounty to early users, more information on that will be released soon.
