Friday, July 18, 2014: 9:00 pm (Manning): The Dark Mail Initiative represents a collaborative effort to bring about a new generation of standards designed to provide automatic end-to-end encryption for email. The presentation will cover the "dmail" architecture, with a focus on the key elements of the design that allow it to overcome some of the most problematic traditional usability issues, all the while preserving a world-class guarantee of security. Dark Mail stands in a unique position against most competing technologies because of its commitment to complete transparency, both in the proposed open dmail specifications and in the open source implementation that is targeted for release later this year. The talk will also include a short discussion of the Lavabit legal saga that precipitated the dmail development effort, the design goals of the project, and an explanation of why these goals are important, both to the computer security community and to society at large. The discussion will conclude with a short update on the status of the reference implementation development effort.

Ladar Levison, Stephen Watt