Hey there! I'm the designer of the product (and co-founder). Totally understand, we've been working as hard as we can to provide clear information, and I had a lot more written about encryption and cryptoauthentication before I realized it may be too focused (we want to get regular people excited about building projects). Cryptography is incredibly important to me, and my ultimate plan is for these boards to be useful in creating dark mesh nets so people can communicate freely even when others try to cut them off. The protocol will be lightweight and we support sending arbitrary data, so it shouldn't be hard to patch it into a network. I still remember the cryptocat articles from a couple months back, and the snooping from the NSA has turned me into a crypto evangelist, so I absolutely intend to provide real strong cryptography. I also understand how skeptical people are (and should be) about crypto systems, so as I'm still learning about this stuff I've been careful not to boast too much before I've got the exact system sorted.

Currently the plan is full support for multiple master keys for different purposes (one for firmware updates, one for data, perhaps one for trusted guests, out of 16 total possible keys), per-packet session keys using AES-256, and I'm very curious about ECC, which it appears our system might support, since the encrypt/decrypt are software (though the new radio has an AES-128 hardware engine too).

We'll give a LOT of detailed information on the development of this system as it happens (after the kickstarter). My plan is to design a system that any HN reader would be proud of. We're not going to "let open source do it", we're writing it ourselves and I've loaded my tablet full of crypto e-books so I can genuinely learn from the ground up how to do that. Even if ultimately I don't write the software, I absolutely will not sell a system as cryptographically secure unless I personally understand how it is built and why it is secure.