NATO is testing out this decentralized messenger for communications between member nations

NATO is doubling down on cybersecurity at a time when hacks are at an all-time high.

The organization is trialing what it calls a NATO Interoperable Instant Communication Environment (NI2CE for short), developed by Matrix, the self-described “open network for secure, decentralized communication.”

Details of how the NI2CE system works were outlined by Jeroen Franssen, a community manager in the Innovation Branch of Allied Command Transformation in NATO, at a recent conference for Matrix users in Berlin. “We are allowed to experiment, and to explore,” says Franssen. The proof of concept is being limited to around 700 users across NATO at present before a wider roll-out. “The initial scope was for a limited number of users,” says Franssen, who acts as the overseer of the project.

A number of NATO member states actually already use Matrix tech in their work. Those nations are interested in the tech because “it’s open-source and encrypted, they have control over it, and also they don’t have vendor lock-in,” says Matrix co-founder Amandine Le Pape.

Many of those individual countries had adopted the tech informally for their communications, but then contacted the organization behind it in order to get advice on how to set it up more formally. “They now have a community of interest internally within NATO for coordinating these very many disparate things, making sure they can directly talk to one another in federates and do that stuff,” says Matthew Hodgson, another Matrix co-founder.

Member states, including Germany, France, Poland, Austria, Sweden, the U.K. and U.S. have all individually adopted Matrix because of the system’s adaptability and security (it is a protocol as well as an app that can be used for one-to-one communication like WhatsApp, as well as more team-based interaction, such as you see on Teams or Slack). Much of that adoption has come from militaries or departments of defense in individual countries. But Matrix’s federated nature works means all those individual countries can, with small tweaks, ensure that their communications can interact with one another through Matrix. “We very quickly ran into the problem that people didn’t understand Matrix is a federated system,” says Franssen. To fix this, Franssen developed branded iOS and Android apps to ease adoption.

Hodgson says one of the biggest challenges with the work for NATO is setting up “secure model gateways to actually link various deployments together.” (Franssen points out that the tech was used for non-classified information.)

Franssen suggested at the Berlin conference that NI2CE’s adoption, using Matrix, could provide safe instant messaging without data leaks, and its federated and distributed nature means there isn’t a single point of failure in the event of a cybersecurity attack. “It’s a nice fallback solution to be outside your corporate tools,” he says.

The adoption by NATO is a welcomed sign of support for the Matrix project, which has been working on trying to boost the number of users for the tool. Matrix was conceived of in 2013 by Hodgson and Le Pape when the two were working on communication tools for Israeli communications company Amdocs. “We spent three years building it as an open-source non-profit, with no revenue at all within Amdocs, until we sped up in 2017 and then started trying to monetize it, starting by selling mostly professional services,” says Le Pape. One of the first clients was the French government.

At the conference, the organization also launched Matrix 2.0, an attempt to make Matrix more palatable to the average user by giving it a more friendly interface. “The complications of decentralization have basically meant that it hasn’t quite been as glossy as people might expect from Slack or WhatsApp,” says Hodgson. The Matrix team has looked to more mainstream competitors for tips about how to design their interface to make it more familiar to the average user. Franssen says that NATO has developed its own bridges to Signal and WhatsApp, allowing users on Matrix to also interact with people on both apps.

“The bigger picture for Matrix is still for it to replace the whole phone network, rather than just end up being a public sector communication system,” says Hodgson.