An audience member uses an iPhone to send a tweet during an online Twitter town hall meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images) (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – Carnegie Mellon University researchers claim they have created a smartphone messaging app with security that not even the National Security Agency can break.

The app is called SafeSlinger, and is free on the iTunes store, and Google play store for Android phones.

Researchers say the app uses a passphrase which only the user, and the other party can know.

They claim messages cannot be read by a cellular carrier, internet-provider, employer, or anyone else.

The setup takes a few minutes, with the user answering security questions generated by the app that help it generate encryption and authorization credentials.

The app then works just like a regular messaging app.

In a press release from CMU’s CyLab, programmer Michael W. Farb said, “the most important feature is that SafeSlinger provides secure messaging and file transfer without trusting the phone company or any device other than my own smartphone.”

Carnegie Mellon say because the messages are encrypted and require a password to access, many teens are finding the app appealing to protect messages from peers and parents.

The app was introduces at last week’s MobiCom 2013 Conference for Mobile Computing and Networking in Miami.

SafeSlinger’s easy-to-use interface brings cryptography and secure communication to non-expert users, but also achieving military-grade security against hackers,” CyLab scientist Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim said via press release.

CMU released a three-minute video to explain how SafeSlinger works, you can watch that below.

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