HONOLULU—A new encryption-based app, Kibu, available to U.S. military operators and foreign military partners, could change the way militaries and consumers communicate.
Civilian and government officials are accustomed to using their own phones and tend to rely on commercial messaging apps, even when they shouldn’t. For example, U.S. operators in Poland and elsewhere have communicated with Ukrainian counterparts over the popular communication app Signal, because of its wide adoption and availability on regular consumer phones.
But those conversations—particularly those involving U.S. special operators—may occur over networks that the U.S. military doesn’t own, so-called dirty networks. This is because they often conduct operations with allied militaries that don’t have access to U.S. top-secret communications platforms or equipment, a challenge that participants at a recent irregular warfare symposium here highlighted across multiple discussions.
“Government executives, they tend to be using their personal devices. They’re on Signal,” Eftychis Gregos Mourginakis, co-founder of secure messaging app Kibu, told Defense One during the Global SOF Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium.
But there’s no guarantee that the individual on the other end of the phone is the right person, or even a person at all, he said. “How [do State Department officials] trust that when they’re talking to their British compatriot, that it’s actually that person? Like, how do you fill that gap? You can’t do it with voice. You can’t do it on video.”
Recent incidents involving AI agents posing as humans have highlighted the growing trend—one that a current military official who tracks adversary disinformation campaigns said is a big problem, especially for the military and intelligence communities.
“AI has made deception scalable. We’re no longer just fighting phishing emails, we’re fighting synthetic voices, cloned faces, and entire fake identities convincing enough to fool the people who know the real person best,” the official said.
A small number of U.S. special operators are now testing Kibu, which uses encryption and other verification features to make sure that person—or AI agent—you’re talking to is who they say they are. That includes not just device-to-device encryption, but also biometric authentication and, for military members, can include other forms of identification as well. Organizations can add their own, such as the CAC card requirement. The app even has special passcodes in case the user has their own phone or device but is in a situation where someone else is trying to access it against their will.
The app isn’t tied to a device SIM card, phone number, or even PIN number. And different organizations can host it in different cloud environments. “So if an organization basically signs an agreement with us, all of their end users on this platform are totally air-gapped,” Mourginakis said.
And even as the military faces the challenge of keeping adversary AI agents out of sensitive conversations, they also want to use more AI under what the military calls “meaningful human control.”
Mourginakis said the app allows individuals to build their own agents within the environment to communicate with unmanned weapons but still report back to the human operator.
“The identity can look like a human identity, but it can be sandboxed by the human users in that space. They need to biometrically prove it,” he said. “You can see we have a decision quorum. So if I need in this group to authorize certain things, say a certain number of these people need to approve these actions, here they can communicate about it, they can talk about it, they can share the intelligence they need, and then go, hey, yeah, I’m good to do this. Commit my decision. Thumbs up. It’s approved.”
While military members face the most immediate need for that sort of verification, Mourginakis said, secure communication is a growing priority for civilians as well.
He sees a shift away from tech products that monetize consumers’ data and push sharing of content toward companies that prioritize privacy.
“Now because of that and the rise of AI slop, the biggest premium service is going to be privacy, trust, security as a service.”
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