We don't need no NSA up is our business, right? CyanogenMod recently added the Privacy Guard feature to nightlies to protect user data from sketchy apps, but the next innovation might go deeper than that. Koushik Dutta (Koush) has started development of a secure messaging platform for CyanogenMod devices.
Koush expressed his admiration for the elegance of iMessage in his post, and he wants to do the same for CyanogenMod. To that end, Koush has built an encrypted open source push messaging plugin for CM that would stand in for regular SMS. It's built into the framework so it works transparently with any SMS app. This is essentially PGP for text messages, but falls back to regular SMS when needed.
The plugin would only work for push messaging between two CyanogenMod devices, but there are about 7 million of those now. So maybe it will get a lot of use. There are still plenty of unanswered questions. Will there be read receipts? Will users know if their message is going over the encrypted system prior to sending? The plugin is new and still in active development. Koush is looking for feedback, but it's too early for serious testing of the features yet. Could be pretty cool, though.