Electronic Mail Security

6091 Words25 Pages
SECURITY AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS Security Comm. Networks 2013; 6:100–107 Published online 17 May 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sec.536 RESEARCH ARTICLE Secure multicast key protocol for electronic mail systems with providing perfect forward secrecy Hsing-Chung Chen* Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University, No. 500, Lioufeng Rd., Wufeng, Taichung City, 41354 Taiwan ABSTRACT Electronic mail (e-mail) systems are widely used in the Internet. A user usually needs to send an e-mail to a group of users. In this paper, a secure multicast key protocol for e-mail systems with providing perfect forward secrecy is proposed to ensure confidentiality and authentication of this kind of e-mail system. The protocol employs the Chinese Remainder Theorem, RSA public key cryptosystems, and one-way hash functions. The protocol can save redundant key materials used for the e-mails. Via the security analysis, the protocol can satisfy the security requirements. In addition, we analyze the computation complexity of the protocol. The result showed that the protocol can save the computation cost for each e-mail sender. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEYWORDS cryptography; electronic mail; data security; key agreement; group key; group communication; Chinese Remainder Theorem *Correspondence Hsing-Chung Chen, IEEE member, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University, No. 500, Lioufeng Rd., Wufeng, Taichung City, 41354, Taiwan. E-mail: shin8409@ms6.hinet.net, cdma2000@asia.edu.tw 1. INTRODUCTION People widely use electronic mails (e-mails) to communicate with each other via the Internet. Delivering an e-mail in the Internet, people can exchange not only normal text-based letter but also sensitive rich electronic files. Because of the popularity, e-mail systems
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