Security in the name of freedom. This is the message that the French Prime Minister wanted to convey, by signing a circular concerning cybersecurity, published on November 22, 2023. According to information from the newspaper PointÉlisabeth Borne asked her ministers, secretaries of state and directors and members of cabinets to do not use anymore instant messaging Whatsapp, Telegram or Signal. The cause is cybersecurity problems. “The main applications of instant messaging general public occupy a growing place in our daily communications. However, these digital tools are not without security vulnerabilities and thus do not ensure the security of conversations and information shared through them.”, is it written on the circular. The people concerned have until December 8 at the latest to uninstall the applications from their phones and computers in favor of Olvid or Tchap.
Olvid, a French application offered as a replacement
Whatsapp and Signal, owned by the Americans, or even Telegram, created by the Russians, would not make it possible to secure the data circulating there, according to the French government. As a replacement, the circular mentions Olvid as “the only private messaging platform having received the first level security certification (CSPN) from the National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI)”. Designed by a Parisian start-up, Olvid brilliantly succeeded in countering ANSSI intrusion tests. The latter carried out multiple attacks for more than thirty days in order to penetrate the source code of the application, without succeeding. A pride that the small company of around fifteen people, created by Thomas Baignères, holder of a thesis in cryptography at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Matthieu Finiasz, researcher and normalien, were proud to share on their site. The French application works with the same principle of message encryption than its competitors, thus preventing application owners from having access to user messages. Cybersecurity is a primary issue in order to maintain freedom of expression between political figures who often share sensitive and confidential data. In February 2023, the European Commission took a measure in the same direction, by prohibiting its parliamentarians from installing the Tik Tok application on their phones.