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 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 sourcethat direct the recipients to the fake websites that exist for the purpose ofstealing 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 digitalsignatures use cryptographic techniques to protect data integrity and authenticity.The digitally signed e-mail tends to increase recipients trust in emailinfrastructure.
Over the past two decades the Internet community has adopted three standards toallow integrity and privacy protection for e-mail exchange namely: Privacy EnhancedMail (PEM), Open PGP, and S/MIME. The barrier in adopting these techniques has beenthe deployment of these mutually incompatible standards for signed email. Theproblem caused by competing standards is that there is no guarantee that a signedmessage will be verifiable by the recipient. The other problem is that signatures orsometimes the original email message itself, appear as indecipherable attachmentswhen email clients having some other MIME-based standard, receive them.
This standardization problem has now been solved by the wide-scale deployment ofmail clients implementing the S/MIME standard. Support for S/MIME is built-in toMicrosoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla and Netscape. Moreover, the keys byseveral popular certification authorities (CAs) are distributed both with theseprograms and with many popular operating systems. Thus, there is a high likelihoodthat digitally signed mail, once sent, can be readily verified.
Financial organizations, retailers and other business entities doing business oninternet should adopt the practice of digitally-signing their mail to customers withS/MIME signatures using a certificate signed by a widely-published CA's.
One of the reasons S/MIME has not become popular with end users is the lack ofawareness of the technology and its benefits. However this does not need to stoporganizations from benefiting from the technology. S/MIME solutions from E-Lockoffer the capability to automatically sign the mails that are generated in bulk orautomatically. Signing the mails will ensure that they do not get filtered out byanti-spam of junk mail filtering programs. The recipient users would also be assuredof their authenticity.Another place where E-Lock S/MIME solution has been used is forapplication-to-application communication. Organizations like RosettaNet have definedextensive standards to automate the communication between disparate applicationslike Supply-chain, transport, procurement, dispatch and delivery. These standardsuse XML as the basic messaging format and define S/MIME as the communicationmechanism.
E-Lo ck S/MIME solutions are available in two forms - one a Java based API andanother a Windows based automated application. Contact E-Lock for furtherinformation.
