Nautilus is a program which allows two parties to securely communicate using modems or TCP/IP. It runs from a command line and is available for the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

operating systems. The name was based upon Jules Verne's

Nautilus The nautilus (, ) is a pelagic marine mollusc of the cephalopod family Nautilidae. The nautilus is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and of its smaller but near equal suborder, Nautilina. It comprises six living species in ...

and its ability to overcome a

Clipper ship A clipper was a type of mid-19th-century merchant sailing vessel, designed for speed. Clippers were generally narrow for their length, small by later 19th century standards, could carry limited bulk freight, and had a large total sail area. "Cl ...

as a play on

Clipper chip The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as an encryption device that secured "voice and data messages" with a built-in backdoor that was intended to "allow Federal, State, ...

. The program was originally developed by Bill Dorsey, Andy Fingerhut, Paul Rubin, Bill Soley, and David Miller. Nautilus is historically significant in the realm of

secure communication Secure communication is when two entities are communicating and do not want a third party to listen in. For this to be the case, the entities need to communicate in a way that is unsusceptible to eavesdropping or interception. Secure communication ...

s because it was one of the first programs which were released as open source to the general public which used strong encryption. It was created as a response to the

in which the US government planned to use a key escrow scheme on all products which used the chip. This would allow them to monitor "secure" communications. Once this program and another similar program

PGPfone PGPfone was a secure voice telephony system developed by Philip Zimmermann in 1995. The PGPfone protocol had little in common with Zimmermann's popular PGP email encryption package, except for the use of the name. It used ephemeral Diffie-Hel ...

were available on the internet, the proverbial cat was "out of the bag" and it would have been nearly impossible to stop the use of strong encryption for telephone communications. The project had to move their web presence by the end of May 2014 due to the decision of to shut down the developer platform that hosted the project.

External links

new Nautilus homepage from May 1 2014 on

{{telephony-stub Secure communication Cryptographic software VoIP software