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How to make secure email easier to use

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Cryptographically protected email has a justly deserved reputation of being difficult to use. Based on an analysis of the PEM, PGP and S/MIME standards and a survey of 470 merchants who sell products on Amazon.com, we argue that the vast majority of Internet users can start enjoying digitally signed email today. We present suggestions for the use of digitally signed mail in e-commerce and simple modifications to webmail systems that would significantly increase integrity, privacy and authorship guarantees that those systems make. We then show how to use the S/MIME standard to extend such protections Internet-wide. Finally, we argue that software vendors must make minor changes to the way that mail clients store email before unsophisticated users can safely handle mail that is sealed with encryption.

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D. Balenson. RFC 1423: Privacy enhancement for Internet electronic mail: Part III: Algorithms, modes, and identifiers, February 1993. Obsoletes RFC1115. Status: PROPOSED STANDARD.]]
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Ian Brown and C. Richard Snow. A proxy approach to e-mail security. Software Practice and Experience, 29:1049-1060, October 1999.]]
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J. Callas, L. Donnerhacke, H. Finney, and R. Thayer. RFC 2440: OpenPGP message format, November 1998. Status: PROPOSED STANDARD.]]
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J. Linn. RFC 1421: Privacy enhancement for Internet electronic mail: Part I: Message encryption and authentication procedures, February 1993. Obsoletes RFC1113. Status: PROPOSED STANDARD.]]
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Mindy Pereira. Trusted S/MIME Gateways. Dartmouth College, May 2003. Senior Honors Thesis: Winter/Spring 2003, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College.]]
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2005
928 pages
ISBN:1581139985
DOI:10.1145/1054972
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 April 2005

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  1. e-commerce
  2. user interaction design
  3. user studies

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