Internet Electronic Mail Security

Abstract Electronic mail is the oldest of all the Internet applications and the most insecure. The need for corporate users to correspond securely with external business partners using Internet E-mail is growing at an alarming rate. Currently, corporate users are sending sensitive data over the Internet using E-mail. This data is being sent to business partners and potential clients over an insecure medium. The most robust solution requires a change to both the E-mail server and client. The underlying security mechanisms consist of confidentiality, integrity, message authentication, and availability. The two proposed secure client E-mail standards are PGP/MIME and S/MIME. These standards also require a public key infrastructure (PKI), which is necessary to support certificate management and validation. The major technical hurdles to date are certificate cross certification, where one organization that has its own certificate authority (CA) agrees to accept certificates signed by the CA of another organiza...