August 31st, 2023

Support for the Advanced Protection Program

Neil J.
Founder
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Today we released Mimestream 1.1, and we’re thrilled to announce that Mimestream has been approved by Google for use with the Advanced Protection Program. Support for this program has been a top request from security-conscious and enterprise users.

While we don’t recommend it for most users, if you’re very concerned about targeted and sophisticated phishing attacks, the program requires hardware security keys and introduces other measures to provide the highest level of protection to your Google account.

Getting started with FIDO security keys

To get started, you will need to purchase at least two FIDO hardware security keys – one as a primary, and one as a backup to be kept in a safe location. It’s essential to not lose your keys, which is why this program isn’t recommended for most users. We personally use the Security Key C NFC by Yubico (also on Amazon) and are quite happy with them. At the time of this writing, Google’s Titan Security Keys were out of stock.

Post-Enrollment Experience

Once you’ve enrolled in Advanced Protection, you’ll be logged out of all devices, apps, and services. You’ll have to re-authenticate each app, using your security key as a second factor to your password. On your iPhone, you can use the NFC functionality of the key, and on your Mac, you can plug it into a USB-C port.

Please note – some apps and services you’re already using may not be approved for use with Advanced Protection. As always, Mimestream is committed to your privacy and stores your data on your device, without using an intermediary sync server, allowing it to meet the program’s requirements.

Special thanks to the folks at Google who helped make this approval happen!

Other Improvements for Mimestream 1.1

Since our 1.0 release, we’ve had an influx of new users and have focused on making a variety of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes:

Our portal for license management has also received a few improvements:

We’re currently working on a mix of short-term improvements and long-term projects, and look forward to announcing more improvements in the future.