Email encryption | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

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 publications (2)

Related concepts (12)

Related courses (17)

Related lectures (133)

Email encryption

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.

ClaimChain: Improving the Security and Privacy of In-band Key Distribution for Messaging

Carmela González Troncoso, Bogdan Kulynych, Wouter Lueks

The social demand for email end-to-end encryption is barely supported by mainstream service providers. Autocrypt is a new community -driven open specification for e-mail encryption that attempts to respond to this demand. In Autocrypt the encryption keys are attached directly to messages, and thus the encryption can be implemented by email clients without any collaboration of the providers. The decentralized nature of this in-band key distribution, however, makes it prone to man-in-the-middle attacks and can leak the social graph of users. To address this problem we introduce ClaimChain, a cryptographic construction for privacy-preserving authentication of public keys. Users store claims about their identities and keys, as well as their beliefs about others, in ClaimChains. These chains form authenticated decentralized repositories that enable users to prove the authenticity of both their keys and the keys of their contacts. ClaimChains are encrypted, and therefore protect the stored information, such as keys and contact identities, from prying eyes. At the same time, ClaimChain implements mechanisms to provide strong non-equivocation properties, discouraging malicious actors from distributing conflicting or inauthentic claims. We implemented ClaimChain and we show that it offers reasonable performance, low overhead, and authenticity guarantees.

ACM2018

Enforcing email addresses privacy using tokens

Serge Vaudenay, Roman Schlegel

We propose a system which allows users to monitor how their email addresses are used and how they spread over the Internet. This protects the privacy of the user and can reduce the spam phenomenon. Our solution does not require changes to the email infrastructure, can be set up by the end user on an individual basis and is compatible with any email client as long as emails are centralized on a server (e.g. an IMAP server). Nevertheless, it requires that people use email messaging quite differently

2005

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

Training for Experts in Digital Education

Emphasizes selecting images to evoke positive emotions and clarify training content in digital education.

Covers self-similar groups and automorphisms of rooted trees, exploring residually finite groups and congruence subgroups.

Scaling & Renormalization in Statistical Mechanics PHYS-739: Conformal Field theory and Gravity

Explores scaling and renormalization in statistical mechanics, emphasizing critical points and invariant properties.