Encryption for the masses with pretty Easy privacy (p≡p) A rough overview

by Hernâni Marques

At: FOSDEM 2017

A rough overview on the pretty Easy privacy (p≡p) project:

p≡p stands for pretty Easy privacy. The idea is to ease the use of well-knownand established end-to-end cryptographic tools for already existing and widelyused written digital communication channels, starting with email and radicallyeasing adoption of OpenPGP-compliant encryption for it. Later on, XMPP-basedcommunication channels (using e.g. OTR) and others will be added, with theultimate goal to route all messages through GNUnet, a secure peer-to-peerframework, which doest not just protect message contents, but also metadata.

Basically, p≡p's proposed and (to some degree) already implemented protocolsautomate the steps taught to users at CryptoPartys, from which the projectemerged.

p≡p supports multiple platforms (e.g., Android, *BSDs, GNU/Linuxdistributions, iOS, MacOS X and Windows), multiple programming languages andenvironments (e.g., C#/COM, C++/Qt, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C/Swift andPython) and will provide easy access to multiple crypto technologies throughan abstract API which doesn't require application developers to have in-depthcryptographic knowledge, i.e. the p≡p engine takes care of the details. Thefocus for now is to have OpenPGP-compatible communications for emailwidespread, using already existing crypto tools like GnuPG and a NetPGP fork(needed for iOS).

p≡p's core parts (the p≡p engine and the adapters / bindings for differentprogramming languages) are owned by the Swiss-based, tax-free p≡p foundationand held under the GNU GPL v3 license alongside with the p≡p trademarks. Thefoundation is run by privacy activists from Germany and Switzerland. Anyproject willing to implement p≡p will be supported, especially in the FreeSoftware world. For trust and security reasons, the p≡p foundation requiresprojects to let their p≡p implementations code audited by a trustworthyindependent firm upon every release, if they want to use the p≡p trademarks,so as to make sure there are no backdoors in officially endorsed p≡p end-usersoftware. The p≡p foundation, for cases where the money for such undertakingsis not available, is willing to either finance the code audits itself or toorganize such funding at least.

p≡p foundation has close cooperations with the Enigmail (Enigmail 2.0 will beEnigmail/p≡p), the GNUnet project and soon ISOC Switzerland (ISOC-CH).

But there's also extensive exchange with other groups like the CCC(particularly in Switzerland), the FSFE, the Mozilla Foundation (MozillaThunderbird in particular), The Reva & David Logan Foundation and the GnuPGproject.

The Lightning Talk will be quite short: 10mins. 5mins will be reserved for(hopefully) lots of questions. :) (For further and more detailled questions,just visit us at the GNU Taler / p≡p foundation stand in building K, level 1,group A.)

The speaker, Hernâni Marques, is council member of the p≡p foundation.

(Note that this talk was originally going to be presented by Volker Birk, p≡pfoundation's council president, who now cannot be present.)

Room: H.2215 (Ferrer)
Scheduled start: 2017-02-04 12:40:00