Security Analysis of Email Systems

Abstract

Electronic mail (email) is universally used by businesses, government agencies, and individual users. Out of necessity, users trust their email systems to keep their emails safe and secure. However, email systems are often complex and exhaustive testing is almost impossible for such systems. As a result, email systems often contain bugs and security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we analyze the security and usability of five popular public email systems. Our analysis shows that there are several security vulnerabilities in multiple sign-in and password composition and recovery policy of some of the email systems.