Amazon Buys Wickr, A Secure Messaging App Founded by NJIT Alumni, Faculty

Online commerce giant Amazon recently acquired Wickr, a secure messaging company founded at NJIT in 2011 that's known for its focus on corporate and military customers, and will integrate the technology into its Amazon Web Services portfolio.

Wickr's Highlander roots run deep, as most of its early employees are affiliated with Ying Wu College of Computing, including co-founder, alumnus, and senior university lecturer Robert Statica, adjunct instructor Chris Howell and alumna Kara Coppa.

"Wickr is a product of Newark and New Jersey," said Statica, a senior university lecturer in informatics who was also a founder of the college's information technology division with Fadi Deek.

Wickr formed in NJIT's Venturelink incubator offices in 2011, then known as the Enterprise Development Center. The company continued growing with venture capital from Silicon Valley, hiring NJIT graduates whenever possible, and moved into larger offices in Newark's Military Park neighborhood. They settled in Manhattan and reached 100 employees, along with 100 patents and millions of users worldwide. Wickr's most noteworthy win was a $35 million contract to develop a secure communications system for the U.S. Air Force, ahead of attracting Amazon's attention.

The company's products fall into four categories — individual users (Wickr Me), small businesses (Wickr Pro), large businesses (Wickr Enterprise) and military (Wickr RAM). Most NJIT users would opt for the first two categories. The individual version, Wickr Me, is a free competitor to popular mobile applications such as Signal and Telegram, along with less secure applications such as Snapchat and WhatsApp. Statica said Wickr's advantages are that it does not collect personal information, its servers never see the message content and it is built on encryption technology approved by the National Security Agency.

"It has never been hacked," Statica said. "Because of that I created a bounty program for Wickr. I offered $100,000 for anybody that can hack it. So far nobody claimed the prize in over 10 years. There were a couple of small bugs."

Statica is no longer involved with Wickr's daily operations, but said he is excited about the new possibilities ahead. "I think with the resources of Amazon they can create a highly available system that is operational 99.999% of the time. Also, as an Amazon company, it could attract new talent from all over the world, which as a startup was hard to do."

Amazon did not disclose the acquisition terms, and Statica intends to keep teaching at NJIT. "For me it's not about the money, it's about the difference I can make for the future generations. For me it's still interesting and exciting. This is very rewarding to me, and that's the reason why I still want to do it," he said.

"At Wickr I recommended hiring many [NJIT] graduates from the information technology, computer science, information systems and electrical engineering departments — from B.S. to Ph.D. level — and the success of the platform, both from the encryption point of view and from the development point of view, is due in part to the quality of teaching we are doing in the college. Ying Wu College of Computing graduates proved to have the highest level of programming, cybersecurity, networking and UI/UX design capabilities," he stated.

Statica believes that future security products will be improved by blockchain software and by efforts to block the brute-force ability of quantum computing. He's working to make those predictions come true, in planning a new NJIT course on secure blockchain for the spring 2022 semester and developing a quantum-proof encryption software development kit with Coppa at their new company, BLAKFX.