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SoK: Securing Email—A Stakeholder-Based Analysis

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12674))

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Abstract

While email is the most ubiquitous and interoperable form of online communication today, it was not conceived with strong security guarantees, and the ensuing security enhancements are, by contrast, lacking in both ubiquity and interoperability. This situation motivates our research. We begin by identifying a variety of stakeholders who have an interest in the current email system and in efforts to provide secure solutions. We then use the tussle among stakeholders to explain the evolution of fragmented secure email solutions undertaken by industry, academia, and independent developers, and to draw the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all solution is unlikely. We highlight that vulnerable users are not well served by current solutions. We also account for the failure of PGP, and argue secure messaging, while complementary, is not a fully substitutable technology.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Including Phil Zimmermann [46], the creator of PGP; Moxie Marlinspike [99], who called PGP a “glorious experiment that has run its course,” and Filippo Valsorda [148], who bemoans the challenges of maintaining long-term PGP keys.

  2. 2.

    With the advent of free domain certificates with Let’s Encrypt, it is possible that more providers are using verifiable certificates since these measurements were conducted in 2015–2016.

  3. 3.

    Of note, S/MIME uses a supporting suite of certificate management protocols, including RFC 5280 [28], which defines an IETF subset of X.509v3 certificates.

  4. 4.

    Revocation of a compromised private key can be supported by having versions of the key. The result of obtaining an incorrect key version is comparable to obtaining a compromised key. The trust model of IBE is tantamount to a trusted public key server.

  5. 5.

    PGP was distributed as freeware on the Internet in 1991, leading to an investigation of Zimmermann by the United States Customs Office for allegedly violating U.S. export laws. He published the PGP source code in book form in 1995 [158], and the case was subsequently dropped in 1996 [91].

  6. 6.

    https://keybase.io.

  7. 7.

    To illustrate, a student emailed a bomb threat to Harvard’s administration via webmail accessed over Tor [36]. The suspect was found to be the only individual accessing Tor on Harvard’s network at the time the email was sent—while strictly circumstantial, the suspect confessed [61].

  8. 8.

    Fingerprint comparison is common with secure messaging applications, but the feature is often ignored by users [137].

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the reviewers for spirited feedback, and the final version was highly reshaped based on their suggestions. J. Clark acknowledges funding from the NSERC/Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton/Catallaxy Industrial Research Chair and his Discovery Grant. P.C. van Oorschot acknowledges NSERC funding for both his Canada Research Chair and a Discovery Grant. K. Seamons and D. Zappala acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation Grant No. CNS-1816929.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  2. Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

    P. C. van Oorschot

  3. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

    Scott Ruoti

  4. Brigham Young University, Provo, USA

    Kent Seamons & Daniel Zappala

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  1. Jeremy Clark
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  2. P. C. van Oorschot
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  3. Scott Ruoti
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  4. Kent Seamons
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  5. Daniel Zappala
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Correspondence to Jeremy Clark .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nikita Borisov

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Claudia Diaz

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Clark, J., van Oorschot, P.C., Ruoti, S., Seamons, K., Zappala, D. (2021). SoK: Securing Email—A Stakeholder-Based Analysis. In: Borisov, N., Diaz, C. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12674. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_18

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