Wireless E-mail Security: A State-of-the-Art Review for Message Privacy and Protection from Application Perspective

This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of primary schemes for wireless e-mail security. It attempts to discuss most common standards available in the market place for e-mail security as well as their applicability on message privacy and protection. The main focus is given on e-mail security standards, message format types, email certificate and trust management systems and issues associated with each of these concepts from privacy and message integrity protection perspectives. Their applications on these two main security service areas are examined and real-world applied solutions are analyzed. The most common security standards, which are overviewed here, are 3DES, PEM, MOSS, PGP, PGP/MIME and S/MIME. It is assumed readers have basic knowledge on MIME specification.