The CryptoRights Foundation, Inc. (CRF) is a

501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of the 29 types of 50 ...

non-profit organization based in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. The CryptoRights Foundation helps human rights groups and other NGOs use encryption to protect their online communications. It has contributed to encryption standards such as

OpenPGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an encryption program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is used for signing, encrypting, and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories, and whole disk partitio ...

IPsec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...

and GnuPG. The organization was founded on 26 February 1998 during a total solar eclipse (near maximum totality off the active volcanic Caribbean island of Montserrat) on a boat chartered by attendees of the International Financial Cryptography Association conference on Anguilla by Dave Del Torto and a group of fellow "cypherpunk" cryptology experts. Significant technology projects include the development of HighFire ("Human rights Firewall"), a distributed communications platform for private NGO communications (on a miniaturized PC called the FireBox, about the size of a cable modem), and the related HighWire, a wireless human rights communications networking project that became the open source

Software Defined Radio Software-defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system where components that have been traditionally implemented in analog hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detector (radio), detectors, etc.) are instead ...

source code now maintained at GnuRadio. CRF provides free security training and support for human rights and journalism organizations on the use of

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

.Will Rodger, "Safe Haven", ''Interactive Week'', v.8, no. 28, p.30 (July 16, 2001). A CRF team also developed the GPG plug-in for

SquirrelMail SquirrelMail is a project that aims to provide both a web-based email client and a proxy server for the IMAP protocol. The latest stable version 1.4.23-svn is tested with PHP up to version 8.1 and replaces version 1.4.22 which can only run on ...

References

Computer security organizations Foundations based in the United States Freedom of expression organizations Internet privacy organizations Organizations established in 1998 {{US-org-stub

See also

References