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Slack Users – Encrypt Your Messages

May 7, 2018

Slack is a collaboration app that is extremely popular. Microsoft has Teams as a competitor, but I see more people using Slack instead of Teams. The free version of Slack is sufficient for most collaboration projects, but there are paid versions to give you more features. As with any communications method, you need to use encryption to protect the privacy of the data. Some apps like Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram have encryption built-in. You can now encrypt Slack messages by using a tool from MindedSecurity called Shhlack, which is available as a browser extension or a patch for the Slack app. According to a Motherboard post, administrators can read any message regardless of the channel.

"Shhlack is an experiment and an ongoing project, definitely not for production, at the moment, but with a very specific goal in mind: An easy-to-use solution for passing private messages without too much worries," MindedSecurity chief technology officer Stefano Di Paola said in an email. "We built the tool for protecting specific messages from being logged by Slack and being exported in cleartext."

If you choose to install Shhlack, don't forget to share the secret passphrase otherwise Slack users won't be able to decrypt the messages.

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