Safeguard Your e-mail

How will you ensure that e-mail coming to your organization are only being read by intended recipients? Here is an encryption solution that ensures this

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

E -mails are the most preferred way of communication these days both on personal and professional front. But, preventing your mails from being intercepted and read is one of the major concerns these days as they might be carrying your confidential information.

This problem can be dealt with the help of e-mail encryption tools. In one of our recent security surveys, we found that e-mail encryption is going to be the next big thing that a lot of enterprises are planning to implement.

E-mail encryption can be achieved at two levels: Gateway and Desktop. As the names suggest, gateway level is implemented at the enterprise level. All e-mail going out of the organization by all users are automatically encrypted. It it is implemented at the gateway level of the organization. Desktop level e-mail encryption is for individuals. In this, a user has the liberty to decide whether to encrypt an e-mail before sending or not. In this article, we take a look at one of the desktop level e-mail encryption solution called Secured eMail. This needs to be installed at both the sending and receiving end points in order to work. We'll tell you how to deploy it in your organization.

Secured eMail
This is an easy to use desktop e-mail encryption solution that uses 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard - Padded Hashed Message (AES_PHM) encryption algorithm in Cipher Feedback (CFB) mode for encrypting mails. It's also used for encrypting its databases stored on a local machine. For providing a secure communication channel this software uses 'one time shared secret' between two parties. One time shared
secret is the recipient's password and is unique for each contact.

You have to provide it to the recipient only while sending e-mail to him for the first time, and that you can communicate to him either through an SMS or a phone call. Once the recipient has entered it, he is no longer required to provide it again.

Next time, when you send a mail to the same recipient, the software will automatically encrypt it using the shared secret you provided for the first time.

Secured e-Mail checks whether the recipient whom an encrypted mail is being sent to is in the contacts list. If not then it adds new recipients and provides a shared secret

Using Secured eMail with MS Outlook
You can install this software on Windows 2000/XP/2003 and it takes just a few minutes to be integrated into your e-mail client. It supports Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes 6.0 including their higher versions and has to be installed at both sender's and receiver's end After installation is complete you will see a new tab 'Send secured' for sending the mails through Secured eMail client. To send an encrypted e-mail, just click on the 'Send secured' button instead of the 'Send' button. However, at this point if you haven't already added the contact to whom you are sending the mail into 'My Secured Contacts' list, then a 'New Contact' window is launched. Simply, provide the name of the contact.

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