pEp Foundation Ucom Standards Track Solutions GmbH The pretty Easy privacy (pEp) protocols describe a set of conventions for the automation of operations traditionally seen as barriers to the use and deployment of secure end-to-end interpersonal messaging. These include, but are not limited to, key management, key discovery, and private key handling (including peer-to-peer synchronization of private keys and other user data across devices). pEp also introduces means 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. Significantly, the pEp protocols build on already available security formats and message transports (e.g., PGP/MIME), and are written with the intent to be interoperable with already widely-deployed systems in order to facilitate and ease adoption and implementation. This document outlines the general design choices and principles of pEp.