Turms: Secure and Certified Email
The omnipresence of the Internet in the society today has determined an explosive growth of online transactions. However, due to lack of security services such as data secrecy, authentication and integrity, the Internet does not provide all the guarantees that a business communication model would require. In this context, protocols that facilitate secure and fair electronic exchange and certified electronic delivery become essential.
Turms is a secure and certified email system that guarantees that the recipient gets the content of the e-mail if and only if the sender receives an incontestable proof-of-receipt. As opposed to previous solutions that require the trusted third party (TTP) to be on-line for every transaction, our approach is to involve the TTP only in case of dispute, and not require its presence for every transaction. Turms uses verifiable encryption of digital signatures as a cryptographic tool, to ensure that the either both parties get what they desire (one the email, the other one the signature of the message) or none of them does. The system was implemented as a transport driver for the Exim mail server.
Related Publications
| Stateless-Recipient Certified E-mail System based on Verifiable Encryption. Published in the Proceedings of RSA 2002 , McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, CA, USA, February 18-22, 2002. Giuseppe Ateniese and Cristina Nita-Rotaru. [PDF], [BIB]. |
Send your comments and questions to Cristina Nita-Rotaru