Title: E-mail protocols with perfect forward secrecy

Authors: Duncan S. Wong; Xiaojian Tian

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong ' Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Abstract: In IEEE Communication Letters, Kim et al. and Sun et al. proposed several e-mail protocols and claimed that they provide perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we show that under the assumption that the e-mail server is also malicious, Kim et al.'s two e-mail protocols do not provide perfect forward secrecy. While one of Sun et al.'s e-mail protocol provides perfect forward secrecy, it does not provide message authentication. We thus propose an improvement to Sun et al.'s e-mail protocol so that it provides both perfect forward secrecy and message authentication.

Keywords: secure emails; perfect forward secrecy; message authentication; email security; email privacy; email protocols.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2012.048491

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2012 Vol.7 No.1, pp.1 - 5

Published online: 11 Aug 2012 *

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