how do i encrypt my chats from everybody except for NSA?

Asked by kham mai nguyen

  Hi,

  I like your konversation for it's different colors making it easier to read.
  I would like to have some of my private chats to be encrypted and not have servers ops being able read them. I read that ssl or ssh is used. I tried to google "chat encrypted" but did not see any open source program for encryption of chats. I think others want their conversations encrypted too.
  How about this idea: you guys setup a webpage detailing how to go about encrypting chats. Then please let me know of the page's url.

  Regards,
.-kham

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Jan-Philipp Litza (jplitza) said :
#1

I don't really know anything about Konversation, the IRC client, but let me just tell you a bit of cryptographic basics:
IRC over SSL only encrypts the client-server connection, i.e. the server ops will always be able to read what you write. Private chats (i.e. chats with only one person) can be encrypted in many ways, for example by using GnuPG (I don't know if there is an interface for that in Konversation, however, Jabber uses that technique for example). But encrypting a chat with more than one person is quite difficult as all the persons have to be able to decrypt the message without sending a key over the network (otherwise the encryption would be useless). Silc ( http://silc.net ) is an approach to that aim, but it has only a small variety of clients (Gaim has a plugin) as it is similar to IRC but not the same.

I hope this somehow answered your question.

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