Securing Email Communication with XML Technology

This chapter deals with the issues concerning e-mail communication security. We analyze the most popular security mechanisms and standards related to the e-mail communication and identify potential threats and vulnerabilities. The most significant drawback of all current approaches is the impossibility of keeping headers information authentic. This leads to possible impersonation attacks and profiling of the e-mail communication, and encourages spam and phishing activities. Furthermore, none of the currently available security mechanisms supports partial signature generation of the e-mail content by distinct signers, which might be useful in commercial scenarios. To handle these problems, we suggest a new approach, called XMaiL, which can be considered as an advanced email security mechanism based on the popular XML technologies. The proposed XMaiL supersedes all currently available e-mail security standards in the sense of the higher flexibility and security.