Trusted S/MIME Gateways
Mindy Pereira, Sean W. Smith · 2003
The utility of Web-based email clients is clear: a user is able to access their email account from any computer anywhere at any time. However, this option is unavailable to users whose security depends on their key pair being stored either on their local computer or in their browser. Our implementation seeks to solve two problems with secure email services. The first that of mobility: users must have access to their key pairs in order to perform the necessary cryptographic operations. The second is one of transition: initially, users would not want to give up their regular email clients. Keeping these two restrictions in mind, we decided on the implementation of a secure gateway system that works in conjunction with an existing mail server and client. Our result is PKIGate, an S/MIME gateway that uses the DigitalNet (formerly Getronics) S/MIME Freeware Library and IBM’s 4758 secure coprocessor. This thesis presents motivations for the project, a comparison with similar existing products, software and hardware selection, the design, use case scenarios, a discussion of implementation issues, and suggestions for future work. Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the kind assistance of many people. First and foremost, thank you to Grace, Esther, Kristen, and Reid for reading and editing the many incarnations of this thesis and participating in my use case studies. Thanks to Neha for the daily sanity checks and emergency food and beverage supplies. A big thank you to Alex and John for all the help with coding, Linux, and the many other problems I encountered. Also, thank you Mike and Ling for your help with Sherlock. And last, but certainly not least, thank you to Professor Sean Smith for giving me an interesting problem to work on and all the support I needed to make things happen.