E-Mail Today
E-mail is the most widely used application on the Internet today. It is used extensively for business-to-business, business-to-consumer, business internal and interpersonal communication.
Individuals, to convey information of a sensitive nature, often unwittingly utilize conventional e-mail out of its sheer convenience. This form of communication is akin to the transfer of sensitive information on the back of a conventional postcard. The information is vulnerable to disclosure and tampering while it is in transit or storage. Similarly, information in unprotected e-mail is vulnerable to disclosure and tampering as it traverses open networks such as the Internet.
E-Mail Security Risks
Information Confidentiality
Conventional e-mail does not provide for data confidentiality in that the message contents can be disclosed to any party that views it while it is in transit or while it resides unread in the recipient’s mailbox at his/her service provider.
Information Disclosure
Conventional e-mail services do not provide for usage restriction based on administrator-specified access rights. This commonly leads to uncontrolled leakage of the organization’s valuable and often sensitive information assets to untrusted external parties.
Information Tampering
Conventional e-mail communication also does not provide for data integrity in that the message contents can be modified while in transit or while it resides unread in the recipient’s mailbox at the service provider.
Identity Spoofing
Due to the open nature of the Internet, no guarantee is provided as to identity of the author of any e-mail message. Any person connected to the Internet can utilize any mail server worldwide to compose a message with a forged author identity. This type of fraud will go undetected by the recipient of forged e-mail, as no mechanisms are available to establish the true identity of the author.
Business Impact
These security shortcomings impact directly and negatively on the applicability of unprotected e-mail to the communication of any sensitive information. In particular, it impacts on the ability of organizations to leverage it as a serious business tool for the communication of confidential information internally, to business partners and to their customers.
The TSPMail Solution
TSPMail provides the necessary security capabilities that are required to overcome these security shortcomings through the introduction of a mailer-independent security middleware layer into the communications stack of user platform. This security layer performs all the necessary security processing of e-mail messages leaving and entering the user’s desktop.
This solution ensures desktop-to-desktop data confidentiality, data integrity, user authentication and domain-based access restriction. Its innovative design approach to full transparency of security function from both the user and the operating environment ensures ease of deployment into large and complex networks. Additionally, TSPMail provides a domain-based access restriction capability through the revolutionary iSolv Technologies domain access licensing technology to enable organizations to rapidly establish secure virtual communities.
Value Proposition
TSPMail delivers business value through significant cost reduction and increased competitive advantage through the utilization of Internet standards-based, military grade secure messaging as an alternative to conventional secure communication channels such as registered mail, fax and mail courier services.
Some of the business applications in
which TSPMail may be directly applied include: