SMEmail - A New Protocol for the Secure E-mail in Mobile Environments

Abstract

The electronic mail plays an unavoidable role in the humankind communications. With the great interest for the connection via mobile platforms, and the growing number of vulnerabilities and attacks, it is essential to provide suitable security solutions regarding the limitations of resource restricted platforms. Although some solutions such as PGP and S/MIME are currently available for the secure e-mail over the Internet, they are based on traditional public key cryptography that involves huge computational costs. In this paper, a new secure application-layer protocol, called SMEmail, is introduced that provides several security attributes such as confidentiality, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, and forward secrecy of message confidentiality for the electronic mails. SMEmail offers an elliptic curve-based public key solution that uses public keys for the secure key establishment of a symmetric encryption, and is so suitable for the resource restricted platforms such as mobile phones.