The chief executive of PGP Corporation, Phillip Dunkelberger, has hinted the company will release a secure instant messaging (IM) application following the re-launch of the brand in June last year.

During a phone interview, Dunkelberger made reference to IM as an area which has significant potential for innovation.

"Messages of all types need to be secure," he said.

The company was founded following the buy back by its original founders in June last year, after Network Associates decided to sell the brand after five years of limited success.

The original group sold the brand to Network Associates for US$35 million in cash with US$4 million in other options, and although the terms of the buy-back are not on the public record, the newly formed PGP kicked off with a total capital of only US$14 million sourced from investors.

"I don't know if we made a killing... time will tell if new the products are well accepted," he said.

The new PGP group won 4,000 existing Network Associates accounts with the deal.

Conceding Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has not lived up to its promise over the years, Dunkelberger remains upbeat about the company's prospects.

"Traditional PKI has not worked in the areas of messaging and e-mail," he said. "[But] our goal will be to deploy it much like anti-virus software... it will just work".

He says user issues, combined with a lack of understanding of encryption, and complicated key management has hampered growth in PKI.

The technology itself has an interesting history, beginning life as the humble -pretty good privacy" (PGP) software.

Phil Zimmermann, the original author of the PGP software now sits on an advisory board for PGP corporation. He found himself in hot water after placing strong encryption into the public domain at a time that governments regarded it as a non-civilian technology.

"Cryptography has been treated very gingerly by a lot of countries. It was considered a munition in the US," Dunkelberger told ZDNet Australia.  "Zimmermann posted strong encryption".

He was then investigated by the US Government for violating the Munitions Act. It was when users started questioning the security of PGP that Zimmermann published the source code to allow for wider scrutiny. PGP are still publishing open code.

Although the core of PGP is free, Dunkelberger says implementing software based on the -core number crunching" is where he sees opportunity to generate revenues. While turning around acceptance of PKI isn't going to be easy, the chief executive remains confident.

"The proof's going to be in the pudding," he said.

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