“Pretty Easy privacy” wants to restore privacy for everyone

“In these times we need a real privacy solution for all people. And the solution can't be that everyone has to drop what is connecting us to all of our friends.” says privacy evangelist Volker Birk. The German software architect, a known activist in the hacker community, wants to break with some dogma of the crypto community. “What we need is that technical stuff like picking keys, understanding cryptography algorithms and handling has to be the function of our computers, and the user just presses «send».”

pEp provides easy privacy for the corporate world as well. “What good is having a private communication with your friend only after-hours? Companies have a need for privacy and security that at least equals – and probably exceeds - that of the private person” says Leon Schumacher, former Group CIO of two Fortune 100 companies, Co-Founder and CEO of the commercial arm of pEp, the pEp Security SA in Luxembourg. “It is essential for any successful solution to bring privacy and security in a simple way to both the consumer and the corporate world.”

Surprising for a Free Software solution but fully aligned with this strategy, the first platform pEp is supporting is Microsoft Outlook. “We offer today what enterprises need to secure their communication without the users bailing out: a configuration free, zero touch application which just does the job. And it does it right.” The enterprise version has features like key escrow and is supporting fully automated software rollout tools.

What is it then that pEp is doing? The pEp engine is doing exactly what a hacker does when he or she is using PGP: create a good keypair with reliable algorithms, handle it safely, manage public keys of other people, and operate the crypto solution in the best known way to keep it safe. But that's only first step.”

The evangelist has huge plans with pEp. “We want to make being private and secure the default in written communication on the Internet.” he states.

How could that work? “pEp is doing everything. You just press SEND, and pEp ensures that your message leaves your device in the most secure way. It is compatible to all established crypto standards, including OpenPGP, S/MIME and CMS. If you receive an encrypted message from anywhere, pEp can handle it and will answer it in the same encrypted way. You don't even notice that all is encrypted in between. If both sides are using pEp, it is getting even better: then we're using an anonymous transport called GnuNet. With that technology, meta data is no longer readable for an attacker. pEp is fully peer to peer itself. And only you have the keys.”

Hard to believe? The proof of concept already exists: The implementation of the very first version of pEp engine, was tested and runs successfully on GNU/Linux, MacOS X and Microsoft Windows already and it is implementated in an Outlook plugin, where anyone can see show how it all comes together seamlessly. That is the prerelease we have today, and which is being tested by 3 Fortune 500 enterprises right now. Additionally, Georg Greve, founder of Free Software Foundation Europe is a member of the project. Georg also guarantees that pEp will be part of the standard deployment of the Free Software Kolab, a groupware solution for SMBs.” So on the business side, adoption is already growing. But what is with the consumers?

“Next will be the apps for iOS and Android – and the Web browser plugins. If you want to have them quickly, please support our crowdfunding on Indiegogo. The pEp team is 100% committed to this project, and will continue development independently from money. But if people support our initiative through crowdfunding or by simply spreading the word, we can provide pEp for all platforms very quickly. Wouldn't it be nice to have privacy with pEp on your most-loved messaging platform today?”

More background information can be found in an interesting NZZ article. According to that article it is planned to found another company and a foundation in Switzerland.