LIKE MANY OTHER journalists, activists, and software developers I know, I carry my laptop everywhere while I’m traveling. It contains sensitive information; messaging app conversations, email, password databases, encryption keys, unreleased work, web browsers logged into various accounts, and so on. My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker — a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “evil maid,” for example — to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.
Edward Snowden and his friends have a solution. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors — microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras — to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.
Snowden is helping to develop the software through a project he leads at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which receives funding from The Intercept’s parent company. I sit on the FPF board with Snowden, am an FPF founder, and lent some help developing the app, including through nine months of testing. With that noted, I’ll be forthright about the product’s flaws below, and have solicited input for this article from people not involved in the project.
Also collaborating on Haven is the Guardian Project, a global collective of mobile security app developers.
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