The desire to securely communicate is rooted in the need for confidentiality and secrecy. This need to communicate in a secure manner reaches into and is involved in many aspects of society and industry. Indeed, communicating via an electronic medium poses a variety of increased threats and compromises that may expose some methods of communication to the potential loss of confidentiality or rendering the communication unsecure.
Using trusted and private networks may help improve the security of communications, but use of such controlled communication pathways is often costly and frequently impractical. Thus, computing and communication devices, such as personal computers, smart phones, radios, intelligent appliances, and other microprocessor-based communication equipment, often transmit information over untrusted networks but still desire the need to communicate information securely. Users of such devices strive to maintain the security and proprietary nature of communications in a variety of conventional ways, but there remains a further need to securely communicate between devices using an untrusted network.