Implementing Censorship-Resistant Trusted Email Using Blockchain Technology
Yasushi Shinjo, Taiki Watanabe, Yi Zhou, Kazuki Takarada, Masahiro Nakamura · 2024
Currently, widely used email based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is vulnerable to malware attacks because digital signatures are not widely adopted. Huge email service providers have immense authority to censor, monitor, and suspend email accounts. To solve these problems, this paper describes the implementation of trusted email using the blockchain technology Ethereum. In the proposed method, the addresses of blockchain wallets are used as email addresses. The host sending and receiving email registers a local surrogate user that corresponds one-to-one with each wallet address. Users and application developers can use existing programs to send and receive emails to / from local surrogate users and to exchange emails without the cumbersome digital signature procedures. This paper describes an inquiry application using the implemented trusted email. In this inquiry application, unlike conventional web applications, form submission and response reply are completed only by email.