Amazon Web Services Inc. today said that it has acquired a startup called Wickr Inc. with an encrypted messaging app used by large enterprises and public sector organizations.

AWS didn’t disclose how much it’s paying for the startup. San Francisco-based Wickr previously raised more than $50 million from investors.

Wickr’s encrypted messaging app of the same name is in use at organizations such as the U.S. Department of Defense, publicly traded financial firm Discover Financial Services and McKinsey & Co. The app uses end-to-end encryption technology to scramble messages, as well as their file attachments, in a way that makes it impossible even for Wickr itself to view their content.

Every message is encrypted on the user’s device before it’s sent. As a result, when the packets containing the message pass through Wickr’s servers on their way to the recipient’s device, the startup can’t inspect them to access the user’s correspondence.

Hackers can bypass encryption by obtaining the encryption key that was used to scramble the data. To mitigate that risk, Wickr scrambles each message and file using a separate encryption key. That ensures that if hackers somehow manage to steal the key that was used to scramble one of the user’s messages, they can’t compromise any other correspondence.

Wickr provides its core cryptography features alongside a broad range of optional data protection settings that companies can enable as needed. The service offers multifactor authentication support and can integrate with the third-party mobile device management software that a firm uses to secure employee handsets. 

Users, in turn, can choose to have messages automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. That time frame may be as short as a few seconds. After selecting how long the message should stay on the recipient’s device, the sender can configure Wickr to start counting either from the moment the message is sent or from the moment it’s read by the recipient.  

When deleting a message, Wickr doesn’t simply remove it from a device’s storage but also takes the extra step of replacing the data with random bits of code. That makes recovering the information practically impossible.

“The need for this type of secure communications is accelerating,” Stephen Schmidt, AWS’ chief information security officer, wrote in the blog post announcing the acquisition of Wickr today. “With the move to hybrid work environments, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises and government agencies have a growing desire to protect their communications across many remote locations. Wickr’s secure communications solutions help enterprises and government organizations adapt to this change in their workforces.”

AWS, Schmidt added, will continue to offer Wickr’s app. Existing customers can keep using it as before.

The acquisition will expand AWS’ portfolio of communications and collaboration services. The cloud giant offers a Microsoft Teams alternative called Amazon Chime, the Amazon WorkMail email service and Amazon WorkDocs, a collaborative document editing platform similar to Google Docs. The purchase of Wickr hints that AWS may be looking to expand its presence in this market, where it currently has a more limited presence than rivals Microsoft Corp. and Google LLC.

AWS and its top cloud rivals regularly expand into new markets as part of their product strategy. They’ve targeted not only well-established markets such as the collaboration segment but also much more nascent industries. AWS and Microsoft, for example, both have a presence in the space sector with services that allow organizations to rent ground station antennas that can transfer data to and from satellites. Moreover, the companies offer on-demand access to cloud-based quantum computers. 

The acquisition of Wickr may advance the product strategy of not only AWS but also parent Amazon.com Inc., which could use the startup’s technology to build a secure messaging service for consumers. The company might make such a service available through the Amazon Appstore, its Android app marketplace.

Amazon is reported to have considered developing a messaging service in the past. In 2017, a series of reports suggested that the company was building a consumer messaging app called Anytime that would have worked on desktops, handsets and smartwatches. Amazon didn’t bring Anytime to market, but with Wickr’s technology, it could potentially resume the project relatively quickly. 

Photo: Tony Webster/Flickr