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Email is a popular communications medium but instant messaging is quickly gaining ground due to its ‘real time’ nature. While it is an effective and quick way to communicate with coworkers, business partners, and even loved ones; it suffers from the same huge problem as email ... it is majority of it is insecure!

Every message that is sent is like talking in an over-crowded elevator; everybody who wants to listen to your conversation can because it is sent in clear across the Internet.

How do you solve this problem?

There is a small security shop based in France (www.secway.fr) named Secway that have created a product called SIMP (Simple Instant Messaging Privacy). This product installs as a compliment to most of the major chat clients and provides a secure add on to your existing chat client. Yes..that’s right…you don’t have to change your existing chat client for a secure one.

SIMP automatically installs itself as a proxy server for your chat client and performs all the encryption and decryption of the chat session before your client ever sees the information. Encryption requires keys and SIMP has a very elegant key exchange process. When you message someone who has SIMP installed SIMP detects this and prompts you to exchange keys. A simple yes or no and you are chatting securely; if the user does not have SIMP installed the conversation continues on without any encryption as it normally would.

Now that you know what SIMP does, let’s have a look at how easy it is to install and configure. This installation is based on version 2.2.4 of SIMP Lite and the MSN Messenger chat client. Installation for other chat clients is almost identical.

Free download for personal use: http://www.secway.fr/us/products/simplite_msn/home.php