About Us

Numbers Station Inc. was federally incorporated in Canada in January 2022 and is based in Ottawa, Ontario. Our apps are developed and managed by Canadian and US citizens. Our team has decades of combined experience in advanced cyber operations and communications security in the private and public sectors.


Our team met due to a shared interest and history in creating One Time Pad (OTP) based communications that utilized radioactive decay based hardware true random number generators (TRNGs). We realized with the introduction of a true random number generator in Apple's Secure Enclave, a hardware security co-processor built in to iOS devices, that properly implemented OTP based encryption was now practical for widespread use. The sudden progress in the development of quantum computing systems that could break the encryption used by other messaging apps also meant it was suddenly worthwhile to switch to the only guaranteed to be secure quantum safe encryption system until such time as an alternative quantum-safe encryption system had been vetted for a longer time period.


In 2021, a member of our team, likely due to their public sector employment at the time, was targeted by a nation-state level attacker that compromised their mobile device using a "0-click, 0-day" exploit delivered via a popular end-to-end encrypted messaging app.  It was impossible to stop re-exploitation without disabling the app or to capture the exploit and determine what was happening since the other messaging app did not allow for the messages to be blocked or for the raw data to be captured and analyzed before the exploit was triggered. This feature gap led us to create Numbers Station messenger and its block and quarantine zone features which not only protects but also allows confirmation of attack attempts as well as capture of the exploit chain for analysis and disclosure to the relevant vendor so a patch can be created.


By working with small groups of dissidents and journalists at very high risk of similar attacks, explaining to them the steps they could take to harden their iOS devices and assisting them investigating compromises via manual analysis of their devices, the idea was born for the Am I Secure? app. Now a broader group of at risk individuals and organizations can take advantage of the advice and analysis that we provide.