Individuals and organizations today rarely use measures to secure their e-mail communication. Taking into consideration the insecurity and threats to communication on public network, the lack of security measures is surprising. The threats to e-mail communication on public network are:
? Change / modification of e-mail content during transit ? Delivery of e-mails to unauthorized recipients ? Copy of e-mail to unauthorized recipient without the knowledge of the correspondents ? "Phishing" e-mail messages, i.e messages that purport to be from respected source that direct the recipients to the fake websites that exist for the purpose of stealing usernames and passwords ? The use of forged "from" address for sending unwanted mails and viruses
These kinds of attacks can be prevented by the use of cryptography. The digital signatures use cryptographic techniques to protect data integrity and authenticity. The digitally signed e-mail tends to increase recipients trust in email infrastructure.
Over the past two decades the Internet community has adopted three standards to allow integrity and privacy protection for e-mail exchange namely: Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), Open PGP, and S/MIME. The barrier in adopting these techniques has been the deployment of these mutually incompatible standards for signed email. The problem caused by competing standards is that there is no guarantee that a signed message will be verifiable by the recipient. The other problem is that signatures or sometimes the original email message itself, appear as indecipherable attachments when email clients having some other MIME-based standard, receive them.
This standardization problem has now been solved by the wide-scale deployment of mail clients implementing the S/MIME standard. Support for S/MIME is built-in to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla and Netscape. Moreover, the keys by several popular certification authorities (CAs) are distributed both with these programs and with many popular operating systems. Thus, there is a high likelihood that digitally signed mail, once sent, can be readily verified.
Financial organizations, retailers and other business entities doing business on internet should adopt the practice of digitally-signing their mail to customers with S/MIME signatures using a certificate signed by a widely-published CAs.
One of the reasons S/MIME has not become popular with end users is the lack of awareness of the technology and its benefits. However this does not need to stop organizations from benefiting from the technology. S/MIME solutions from E-Lock offer the capability to automatically sign the mails that are generated in bulk or automatically. Signing the mails will ensure that they do not get filtered out by anti-spam of junk mail filtering programs. The recipient users would also be assured of their authenticity. Another place where E-Lock S/MIME solution has been used is for application-to-application communication. Organizations like RosettaNet have defined extensive standards to automate the communication between disparate applications like Supply-chain, transport, procurement, dispatch and delivery. These standards use XML as the basic messaging format and define S/MIME as the communication mechanism.
E-Lock S/MIME solutions are available in two forms - one a Java based API and another a Windows based automated application. Contact E-Lock for further information.
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