Technologies Used For Sending Encrypted Emails

Most secure email service providers now use public key encryption technology. In this type of e-mail encryption the key is posted by the receiver somewhere public where potential senders can locate it and use that for encrypting the message – thus ensuring that the content of the mail can be decrypted only by the intended receiver. This type of encrypted email is found to work fairly well but there has been one major disadvantage of this technique and that is if the user doesn’t have a posted public key or doesn’t use a secure e-mail program – you cannot send them an encrypted email. Authentication is not considered as a problem in this type of email encryption technique because if the receiver can keep his private key secure – there is absolutely no way to decrypt the transmission.

As a matter of fact, secure transmission of data can be achieved through both authentication and encryption. Authentication of the receiver is a difficult task and the simplest form of authentication that is used for sending secure mail is to make the sender and receiver computer communicate with and identify each other. Public key encryption is the most common means of authentication that is presently used that actually authenticates the receiver and not the sender. In a situation when both the receiver and sender have exchanged their public encryption keys, public key encryption can encrypt both of them.

Commercial encryption techniques those are used by secure mail services like Zixmail are certainly the most secure and the keys those are used by this technology is either a particular number or a string of characters that can be used for both encrypting and decrypting mail contents. Being the standard form, private key encryption uses two separate keys for encrypting and decrypting the messages. The sender is required to ask the receiver for the encryption key and after encrypting his mail using that particular key he sends it to the receiver. But the major problem with this kind of email encryption is if anybody possesses the key he can easily decrypt all transmissions and the receiver is required to keep his key secret in order to make the process work.

With modern cryptanalysis it is now possible to decrypt an encrypted email even without the public key and that is certainly one important limitation that secure email service providers are now facing. A longer public key can slow down cryptanalysis but they also slow down encryption and decryption to a considerable extent. There is absolutely no denying the fact that we must be able to send secure emails so that they can be saved from prying eyes – but if the computer at the other end is not secure it is even possible to break the encryption without cryptanalysis and that is the reason if you are looking to send secure encrypted mails – make sure that the computers at the other end are secure too. More resources on secure mail services can be easily found online and you can also visit http://zixmailencryption.com/ for more authentic information.

About The Author

Zeena McWarden is a cyber-security expert who writes many interesting articles to help bring email encryption and its advantages into the domain of common people. You can trust her advice for all your data security and integrity preservation requirements.