Security Existence From Before – In ancient times, mails were encrypted by way of sealing wax as this not only protected the integrity of the mail, but also for tamper-proofing. A cracked seal would indicate a compromise of the document before reaching the intended recipient. In addition to the function of the wax seal, it was utilized as a source of identification from the sender to the recipient. The seal contained the sender’s impression stamp or signet ring as authentication of the sender’s identity. In today’s context, communication by way of mail has evolved digitally to email encryption with similar aspects of Confidentiality, Authentication, Integrity and Nonrepudiation. This article will help you understand the benefits of email encryption.

Emails have become essential in our daily digital communication. Be it for personal or work-related reasons, people exchange sensitive information which is exposed over the internet and if any of these emails are intercepted, data can be stolen. People have often been susceptible to such attacks due to the lack of security, authentication and authorization. Email encryption ensures all these vulnerabilities are mitigated and protects each user. Once an email is encrypted, the data will be scrambled so that the information cannot be understood by anyone other than the intended recipient.

The main aspects of email encryption are Identity Authentication and End-to-end Encryption. Being Asia’s 1st public Certificate Authority (CA) and Singapore’s only commercial IMDA-accredited CA, certificates issued from Netrust allow users to digitally sign emails ensuring that the recipient will be able to verify the sender’s identity, such as being an employee representing a certain organization, his/her name etc. It also provides assurance that the email has not been altered. Further, Netrust-issued certificates enable users to encrypt emails that protect against interception and stealing of data as there is a private key in each of these certificates issued.

With email encryption, the user will require two keys, a Public key and a Private key. The sender will encrypt an email using the recipient’s public key and the recipient decrypts the encrypted email with their own private key.

These are times when extra measures such as email encryption are necessary to prevent the theft of sensitive information. Netrust uses cryptographic technology for email encryption that can only be decrypted by the intended recipient.

Secure Email for Everyone

Organizations that explored email encryption before S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) would have realised that there were certain challenges when deploying a good, robust and effortless solution.

Manual Deployment vs Enterprise Grade Solution

From the above comparison, it is obvious that manual deployment of S/MIME can be a chore for enterprises.

When considering a secure email solution, organization should review the following:

• Simplicity – Does the solution simplify things in comparison to manual deployment? How quickly can email security be enabled for all the users?
• Multiple Platform Support – With ever growing new technology and cross platforms, does the solution support multiple platforms (Microsoft Windows, Mac), email clients (e.g. Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail) and devices (iOS and Android)?
• Business Continuity – How does the solution take care of key escrowing? Are you able to recover the keys should your user change a new laptop? Are they still able to decrypt existing encrypted emails?

The Savior to Complicated S/MIME Deployment 

The diagram below shows how the typical steps are to be done when enabling an email client for secure email.

Before reaching to the above stages, user have to get the Certificate as well. These includes:

1. Generate PKI Keys
2. Generate CSR
3. Send to Certificate Authority for Certificate Issuance
4. Bundle Keys with Certificate

All the steps above are too technical for typical email users!

With our solution, we are able to reduce those steps to 3 simple steps.

Users do not need to worry and perform complicated technical operations to get the secure email credentials nor enabling the client for secure email. All of the above can be seamlessly provided by our Email Enterprise Suite.

Learn how our solution can help you in your journey to enable end-to-end email security in your organization.

• • Also see: Email Encryption

Contact Netrust Sales Team today at sales@netrust.net.

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