Sufyan T. Faraj; Mohammed T. Ibrahem
Abstract
Although e-mail security solutions have been introduced formore than two decades, most of the e-mail messages are sent nowadayswithout being secured by any of these techniques. This ...
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Although e-mail security solutions have been introduced formore than two decades, most of the e-mail messages are sent nowadayswithout being secured by any of these techniques. This is due to thecomplexity of using these secure e-mail systems and protocols. Thecomplexity mainly arises from the difficulty associated with managingcertificates and public keys. The main objective of this study was to finda solution that can make secure e-mail systems easier to use whilemaintaining the same level of security. This paper proposes a secure emailsystem that is based on the S/MIME standard where the publickey and signature algorithms have been replaced by their Identity-Based Cryptography analogue algorithms.Using Identity-Based Cryptography has eliminated the need fordigital certificates, and provided a solution to the usability problempresent in the existing secure e-mail systems. Users can determine thepublic key of the recipient without having to contact any trusted thirdparty, and can start encrypting or verifying messages as long as theyhave the public system parameters that can be publicly available. Usersneed to contact the Private Key Generator (PKG) only once in order toretrieve their private key before being able to decrypt or sign messages
