In doing so, he also helped spark the debate that's endured ever since, over the anarchic freedoms that digital secrecy enables—the conflict between privacy advocates and governments known today as the "crypto wars."

Now Chaum has returned with his first online privacy invention in more than a decade. And with it, he wants to bring those crypto wars to an end.

At the Real World Crypto conference at Stanford University today, Chaum plans to present for the first time a new encryption scheme he calls PrivaTegrity. Like other tools Chaum has spent his long career developing, PrivaTegrity is designed to allow fully secret, anonymous communications that no eavesdropper can crack, whether a hacker or an intelligence agency.