Internet Infrastructure for Privacy-Enhanced Mail

Abstract

This presentation describes Privacy-Enhanced Mail (PEM), a system to provide security for electronic messages. PEM protocols use end-to-end encryption to ensure writer-to-reader security for store-and-forward mail delivery through the Internet. This presentation also describes some of the infrastructure that will support PEM. The Internet is a rapidly growing system of several thousand interconnected computer networks that mainly support science and education. By 1992, the Internet already was serving more than a million host computers in over 100 countries. PEM was designed by a committee that is called the Privacy and Security Research Group (PSRG). A working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is responsible for preparing PEM specifications for publication as Internet standards.