After a brief summary of the basic methods for secure transmission using optical chaos, we report on most recent achievements, namely, on the comparison between the standard two-laser and the three-laser schemes and on the network architecture for multiuser secure transmission. From our investigations, we found that while both the basic twolaser and the three-laser schemes are suitable to secure data exchange, the three-laser scheme offers a better level of privacy due to its symmetrical topology. Moreover, while transmission based on optical chaos is usually restricted to point-to-point interconnections, a more advanced solution, derived from the well-known public key cryptography, allows for private message transmission between any couple of subscribers in a network.