Secure Email Transmission Protocols — A New Architecture Design

During today’s digital age, emails have become a crucial part of communications for both

personal and enterprise usage. However, email transmission protocols were not designed

with security in mind, and this has always been a challenge while trying to make email

transmission more secure. On top of the basic layer of SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols

to send and retrieve emails, there are several other major security protocols used in

current days to secure email transmission such as TLS/SSL, STARTTL, and PGP/GPG

encryption. The most general design used in email transmission architecture is SMTP

with PGP/GPG encryption sending through an TLS/SSL secure channel. Regardless,

vulnerabilities within these security protocols and encryption methods, there is still work

can be done regarding the architecture design. In this paper, we discuss the challenges

among current email transmission security protocols and architectures. We explore some

new techniques and propose a new email transmission architecture using EEKS structure

and Schnorr Signature to eliminate the usage of PGP/GPG for encryption while achieving

Perfect Forward Secrecy.