Authors
Abstract
Although e-mail security solutions have been introduced for
more than two decades, most of the e-mail messages are sent nowadays
without being secured by any of these techniques. This is due to the
complexity of using these secure e-mail systems and protocols. The
complexity mainly arises from the difficulty associated with managing
certificates and public keys. The main objective of this study was to find
a solution that can make secure e-mail systems easier to use while
maintaining the same level of security. This paper proposes a secure email
system that is based on the S/MIME standard where the public
key and signature algorithms have been replaced by their Identity-
Based Cryptography analogue algorithms.
Using Identity-Based Cryptography has eliminated the need for
digital certificates, and provided a solution to the usability problem
present in the existing secure e-mail systems. Users can determine the
public key of the recipient without having to contact any trusted third
party, and can start encrypting or verifying messages as long as they
have the public system parameters that can be publicly available. Users
need to contact the Private Key Generator (PKG) only once in order to
retrieve their private key before being able to decrypt or sign messages
Keywords
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