CONIKS: A Privacy-Preserving Consistent Key Service for Secure End-to-End Communication

"Recent revelations about government surveillance have significantly increased the demand for end-to-end secure communications. However, key management remains a major barrier to adoption. Current systems are often either vulnerable to a malicious or coerced key directory or they make unrealistic assumptions about user behavior, for example, that users will verify key fingerprints out of band. The authors present CONIKS, a system that provides automated key management for end users capable of seamless integration into existing secure messaging applications."