Traditional eMail is vulnerable and without protection against active and passive attacks. Messages by default are transmitted as clear, unencrypted messages and can easily be intercepted and metadata of email traffic can be extracted and analyzed.

In 2004, Ladar Levison therefore founded a secure e-mail service, Lavabit LL.C. Lavabit received international attention in July 2013, when it was revealed to be the preferred eMail provider for Edward Snowden. When the American government ordered Lavabit to hand over the SSL keys to the entire website, Ladar shut down the service. He recently joined forces with another related company, Silent Circle, to create the Dark Mail Alliance. In his keynote, Ladar will talk about his view on the Future of privacy-by-design internet communications and the current state of the Dark Mail Alliance´s efforts to create protocols, standards and opensource codes for such a service.