Email encryption is encryption of email messages to protect the content from being read by entities other than the intended recipients. Email encryption may also include authentication. Email is prone to the disclosure of information. Most emails are encrypted during transmission, but they are stored in clear text, making them readable by third parties such as email providers. By default, popular email services such as Gmail and Outlook do not enable end-to-end encryption. By means of some available tools, persons other than the designated recipients can read the email contents. Email encryption can rely on public-key cryptography, in which users can each publish a public key that others can use to encrypt messages to them, while keeping secret a private key they can use to decrypt such messages or to digitally encrypt and sign messages they send. With the original design of email protocol, the communication between email servers was in plain text, which posed a huge security risk. Over the years, various mechanisms have been proposed to encrypt the communication between email servers. Encryption may occur at the transport level (aka "hop by hop") or end-to-end. Transport layer encryption is often easier to set up and use; end-to-end encryption provides stronger defenses, but can be more difficult to set up and use. One of the most commonly used email encryption extensions is STARTTLS. It is a TLS (SSL) layer over the plaintext communication, allowing email servers to upgrade their plaintext communication to encrypted communication. Assuming that the email servers on both the sender and the recipient side support encrypted communication, an eavesdropper snooping on the communication between the mail servers cannot use a sniffer to see the email contents. Similar STARTTLS extensions exist for the communication between an email client and the email server (see IMAP4 and POP3, as stated by RFC 2595). STARTTLS may be used regardless of whether the email's contents are encrypted using another protocol.

About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (17)
COM-208: Computer networks
This course provides an introduction to computer networks. It describes the principles that underly modern network operation and illustrates them using the Internet as an example.
COM-301: Computer security and privacy
This is an introductory course to computer security and privacy. Its goal is to provide students with means to reason about security and privacy problems, and provide them with tools to confront them.
CS-523: Advanced topics on privacy enhancing technologies
This advanced course will provide students with the knowledge to tackle the design of privacy-preserving ICT systems. Students will learn about existing technologies to prect privacy, and how to evalu
Show more
Related lectures (46)
Scaling & Renormalization in Statistical Mechanics
Explores scaling and renormalization in statistical mechanics, emphasizing critical points and invariant properties.
Online Tracking: Stateful vs. Stateless Methods
Explores online tracking methods, including canvas and AudioContext API fingerprinting, and their privacy implications.
Unsupervised Learning: PCA & K-means
Covers unsupervised learning with PCA and K-means for dimensionality reduction and data clustering.
Show more
Related publications (37)

Authenticated private information retrieval

Bryan Alexander Ford, Simone Maria Stefano Colombo, Henry Nathaniel Corrigan-Gibbs, Kirill Nikitin

This paper introduces protocols for authenticated private information retrieval. These schemes enable a client to fetch a record from a remote database server such that (a) the server does not learn which record the client reads, and (b) the client either ...
Berkeley2023

Moby: A Blackout-Resistant Anonymity Network for Mobile Devices

Bryan Alexander Ford, Antoine Rault, Amogh Pradeep, Hira Javaid

Internet blackouts are challenging environments for anonymity and censorship resistance. Existing popular anonymity networks (e.g., Freenet, I2P, Tor) rely on Internet connectivity to function, making them impracticable during such blackouts. In such a set ...
2022

Verifiable Encodings for Secure Homomorphic Analytics

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Sylvain Chatel, Apostolos Pyrgelis, Christian Louis Knabenhans

Homomorphic encryption, which enables the execution of arithmetic operations directly on ciphertexts, is a promising solution for protecting privacy of cloud-delegated computations on sensitive data. However, the correctness of the computation result is no ...
2022
Show more
Related concepts (9)
Email client
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functions may act as a web email client, and a piece of computer hardware or software whose primary or most visible role is to work as an email client may also use the term. Like most client programs, an email client is only active when a user runs it.
End-to-end encryption
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a private communication system in which only communicating users can participate. As such, no one, including the communication system provider, telecom providers, Internet providers or malicious actors, can access the cryptographic keys needed to converse. End-to-end encryption is intended to prevent data being read or secretly modified, other than by the true sender and recipient(s). The messages are encrypted by the sender but the third party does not have a means to decrypt them, and stores them encrypted.
Public key infrastructure
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email.
Show more

Graph Chatbot

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.