Released on = May 2, 2007, 1:37 am

Press Release Author = Geetanjali

Industry = Internet & Online

Press Release Summary = E-Mail communication with S/MIME solutions which uses
cryptography techniques to protect data integrity and authencity.

Press Release Body = Individuals and organizations today rarely use measures to
secure their e-mail communication. Taking into consideration the insecurity and
threats to communication on public network, the lack of security measures is
surprising. The threats to e-mail communication on public network are:

· Change / modification of e-mail content during transit
· Delivery of e-mails to unauthorized recipients
· Copy of e-mail to unauthorized recipient without the knowledge of the correspondents
· \"Phishing\" e-mail messages, i.e messages that purport to be from respected source
that direct the recipients to the fake websites that exist for the purpose of
stealing usernames and passwords
· The use of forged \"from\" address for sending unwanted mails and viruses

These kinds of attacks can be prevented by the use of cryptography. The digital
signatures use cryptographic techniques to protect data integrity and authenticity.
The digitally signed e-mail tends to increase recipients trust in email
infrastructure.

Over the past two decades the Internet community has adopted three standards to
allow integrity and privacy protection for e-mail exchange namely: Privacy Enhanced
Mail (PEM), Open PGP, and S/MIME. The barrier in adopting these techniques has been
the deployment of these mutually incompatible standards for signed email. The
problem caused by competing standards is that there is no guarantee that a signed
message will be verifiable by the recipient. The other problem is that signatures or
sometimes the original email message itself, appear as indecipherable attachments
when email clients having some other MIME-based standard, receive them.

This standardization problem has now been solved by the wide-scale deployment of
mail clients implementing the S/MIME standard. Support for S/MIME is built-in to
Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla and Netscape. Moreover, the keys by
several popular certification authorities (CAs) are distributed both with these
programs and with many popular operating systems. Thus, there is a high likelihood
that digitally signed mail, once sent, can be readily verified.

Financial organizations, retailers and other business entities doing business on
internet should adopt the practice of digitally-signing their mail to customers with
S/MIME signatures using a certificate signed by a widely-published CA\'s.

One of the reasons S/MIME has not become popular with end users is the lack of
awareness of the technology and its benefits. However this does not need to stop
organizations from benefiting from the technology. S/MIME solutions from E-Lock
offer the capability to automatically sign the mails that are generated in bulk or
automatically. Signing the mails will ensure that they do not get filtered out by
anti-spam of junk mail filtering programs. The recipient users would also be assured
of their authenticity.
Another place where E-Lock S/MIME solution has been used is for
application-to-application communication. Organizations like RosettaNet have defined
extensive standards to automate the communication between disparate applications
like Supply-chain, transport, procurement, dispatch and delivery. These standards
use XML as the basic messaging format and define S/MIME as the communication
mechanism.

E-Lock S/MIME solutions are available in two forms - one a Java based API and
another a Windows based automated application. Contact E-Lock for further
information.



Web Site = http://www.elock.com

Contact Details = Frontier Technologies Corporation (E-Lock)
1105, Waverly Way
McLean, VA 22101,
Phone: 703 734 1224
Email: info@elock.com