A forward-secure e-mail protocol without certificated public keys

Abstract

Forward secrecy in an e-mail system means that compromising of the long-term secret keys of the mail users and mail servers does not affect the confidentiality of the e-mail messages. Previous forward-secure e-mail protocols used the certified public keys of the users using PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). In this paper, we propose a password-based authenticated e-mail protocol providing forward secrecy. The proposed protocol does not require certified public keys and is sufficiently efficient to be executed on resource-restricted mobile devices. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.