Secure Instant Messaging Systems?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday September 23, 2000 @05:20AM from the cloak-and-dagger dept.

Elik writes: "I been asked by the higher up at Netwolves as to the availability of a secure messaging system that uses an encrypted protocol for messaging instead of insecure systems like AIM, MSN, Yahoo or ICQ. From what I have read, they are not secure enough that you can send any secret confidential information though the messenger system, since from the reading, they are not encrypted. Are there secure messaging client/server systems that are available for most platforms, that could be considered secure by using some of the standard encryption systems like 3DES, Blowfish or others?" It shouldn't be too hard to hack support for this into the existing IRC clients. It may not be as cute as most IM systems, but if it's security you want, you may have to sacrifice something. If you are transferring huge amounts of data, why worry about instant messaging systems? Just use PGP (or GPG) to encrypt the data and the plethora of file sharing software currently available on the Internet to get it where you want?

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A Commercial Plug by scotpurl · 2000-09-23 10:02 · Score: 3

SameTime from the folks at Lotus. Integrates with both Exchange and Lotus Notes directories (I think with NT directories, too) as well as LDAP. They actually bought stuff from http://www.ubique.com and merged it with stuff from http://www.databeam.com to create SameTime, and then integrated it into everything. A PIII 500 will support something like 20,000 users.

Anyway, secure, plus beaucoup other functionality. Published, extendable APIs, examples. Video streaming, audio streaming, etc. etc. Uses choice of ActiveX or Java. Version 2.0 is due out the end of the month (or thereabouts). There's a Java version of the chat/instant messaging client, plus a Windows version.

http://www.lotus.com/sametime