The Silent Circle Instant Message Protocol (SCIMP) was an encryption scheme that was developed by
Vincent Moscaritolo of
Silent Circle
Silent Circle is a German Eurodisco band formed in West Germany in 1985. The band consists of vocalist Martin Tychsen (Jo Jo Tyson), keyboardist & composer Axel Breitung, and drummer Jürgen Behrens (CC Behrens).
History
Silent Circle first ...
. It enabled private conversation over instant message transports such as
XMPP
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), ...
(Jabber).
SCIMP provided encryption, perfect
forward secrecy
In cryptography, forward secrecy (FS), also known as perfect forward secrecy (PFS), is a feature of specific key agreement protocols that gives assurances that session keys will not be compromised even if long-term secrets used in the session key e ...
and message authentication. It also handled negotiating the shared secret keys.
History
Silent Circle used SCIMP in their encrypted instant messaging application called Silent Text. Silent Text was discontinued on September 28, 2015, when its features were merged into Silent Circle's encrypted voice calling application called Silent Phone.
At the same time, Silent Circle transitioned to using a protocol that uses the
Double Ratchet Algorithm
In cryptography, the Double Ratchet Algorithm (previously referred to as the Axolotl Ratchet) is a key management algorithm that was developed by Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike in 2013. It can be used as part of a cryptographic protocol to ...
instead of SCIMP.
References
Cryptographic protocols
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