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Dianzi xuebao

Towards a Secure E-mail Protocol with Perfect Forward Secrecy

Ke Xu

Published Jan 1, 2009• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

E-mail has been an important application to transfer the data of communication on Internet.In order to securely and efficiently transfer the E-mail message,many researchers focus on the issues of providing basic encryption function for E-mail protocol or certified E-mail schemes.However,these schemes only meet part of the security requirements for a secure E-mail protocol,and fail to provide a complete solution from the view of a practical secure E-mail protocol.A secure E-mail protocol is defined and proposed for the first time in this paper.In this protocol,the message is encrypted by the short-term encryption keys which are negotiated by the Diffie-Hellman algorithm.The security analysis shows that the scheme not only provides the basic security mechanism but also guarantees the perfect forward secrecy.In addition,this protocol resolves the problems of certification,timeliness and sensitivity,which are strongly needed by a secure E-mail protocol.

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E-mail has been an important application to transfer the data of communication on Internet.In order to securely and efficiently transfer the E-mail message,many researchers focus on the issues of providing basic encryption function for E-mail protocol or certified E-mail schemes.However,these schemes only meet part of the security requirements for a secure E-mail protocol,and fail to provide a complete solution from the view of a practical secure E-mail protocol.A secure E-mail protocol is defined and proposed for the first time in this paper.In this protocol,the message is encrypted by the short-term encryption keys which are negotiated by the Diffie-Hellman algorithm.The security analysis shows that the scheme not only provides the basic security mechanism but also guarantees the perfect forward secrecy.In addition,this protocol resolves the problems of certification,timeliness and sensitivity,which are strongly needed by a secure E-mail protocol.
Electronic mail, E-mail in short, has been used to transfer various types of electronic data on Internet. In order to deliver the E-mail from the sender to the receiver both efficiently and securely, the E-mail system usually employs both conventional and public key cryptographic systems. The basic protection in an E-mail system is to encrypt the bulk mail using a conventional cryptosystem with a short-term key and to protect the short-term key using a public-key cryptosystem with the receiver's public key. However this protection cannot provide perfect forward secrecy because once the receiver's secret key is disclosed, all previous used short-term keys will also be opened and hence all previous E-mails will be learned. Two new E-mail protocols providing perfect forward secrecy are proposed In this work.
With the rapid development of Internet, e-mail has become an essential communication tool. But, the security of e-mail communications is an important issue. Recently, Chen et al. [6] proposed a new protocol of wide use for e-mail. Chen et al. claimed that the proposed protocol is skillfully designed to achieve perfect forward secrecy and end to end security as well as to satisfy the requirements of confidentiality, origin, integrity and easy key management. But, in this paper, we show that Chen et al.’s protocol suffers from the e-mail server impersonation attack, mail content confidentiality attack and replay attack. Moreover, we give an improvement on Chen et al.’s protocol to overcome its security weaknesses, and propose the perfect-mail, a secure e-mail protocol with perfect forward secrecy. It is concluded by analysis that the improved protocol provides the perfect forward secrecy and resists replay attack, impersonation attack, and mail content confidentiality attack. But the communication cost of improved protocol is equal to that of Chen et al.’s protocol, and the computing cost of improved protocol is only added by two signature verification.
Recently, Sun et al. (2005) highlighted the essential property of perfect forward secrecy (PFS) for e-mail protocols when a higher security level is desirable. Furthermore, Sun et al. (2005)’s protocols take only a single e-mail server into account. Actually, it is much more common that the sender and the recipient register at different e-mail servers. Compared to existing protocols, the protocol proposed in this paper takes into account the scenario that the sender and the recipient register at different servers. The proposed protocol is skillfully designed to achieve PFS and end-to-end security as well as to satisfy the requirements of confidentiality, origin, integrity and easy key management. The comparison in terms of functionality and computational efficiency demonstrates the superiority of the present scheme.
In IEEE Communication Letters, Kim et al. and Sun et al. proposed several e–mail protocols and claimed that they provide perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we show that under the assumption that the e–mail server is also malicious, Kim et al.'s two e–mail protocols do not provide perfect forward secrecy. While one of Sun et al.'s e–mail protocol provides perfect forward secrecy, it does not provide message authentication. We thus propose an improvement to Sun et al.'s e–mail protocol so that it provides both perfect forward secrecy and message authentication.
As security enhanced systems for standard e-mail, certified e-mail schemes guarantee the fair exchange of a digital message with the corresponding receipt between two mistrusted parties. That is, the intended receiver gets the e-mail content if and only if the e-mail sender obtains an irrefutable receipt issued by the receiver, which could be used to prove that the message has been delivered to the receiver. A number of such protocols have been proposed in recent years. However, most of them are not suitable for mobile networks, since many intricate cryptographic primitives are involved so that considerable overheads are introduced. In this paper, we present a novel simple protocol for certified e-mail delivery. Technical discussions are provided to show that our new solution is both secure and very efficient so that it is truly suitable for wireless mobile users, where the available devices usually have limited resources on computation, communication, storage, and power supply.