Do you know who's reading your IM chat today? Crypto engineer Jim Lowrey discusses secure chat, instant messages, file transfers, and e-commerce in light of the Magi peer-to-peer architecture. The talk covers how to make make X509 certificates, key registration and revocation, message integrity, message authentication, symmetric key negotiation, and asynchronous secure communication.

Peer to peer computing faces a bewildering array of security issues not faced by other secure computing paradigms. Asynchronous communication, secure traversal over a variety of protocols, and end user knowledge of security form the basis of issues that are not addressed by accepted security standards such as SSL or PGP.

Chat, instant messages, and file transfers all have different requirements to ensure authentication, integrity, and encryption. Public key infrastructure, protocols, and cryptography form the foundation for these requirements. This talk investigates the overall picture as well specific low level examples.