pEp Foundation pEp Foundation pEp Foundation pEp Security Building on already available security formats and message transports (like PGP/MIME for email), and with the intention to stay interoperable to systems widespreadly deployed, pretty Easy privacy (pEp) describes protocols to automatize operations (key management, key discovery, private key handling including peer-to-peer synchronization of private keys and other user data across devices) that have been seen to be barriers to deployment of end-to-end secure interpersonal messaging. pEp also introduces "Trustwords" (instead of fingerprints) to verify communication peers and proposes a trust rating system to denote secure types of communications and signal the privacy level available on a per-user and per-message level. In this document, the general design choices and principles of pEp are outlined.