Making It Easier to Encrypt Your Emails

;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution

For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.

Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.

As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.

We've known for decades how difficult it is to encrypt email. We've developed E3, a client-side system that encrypts email at rest on mail servers to mitigate the most common cases of attacks today. E3 also demonstrates techniques for making key management simple enough for most users, including those who use email on multiple devices.

Email privacy is of crucial importance. Although email accounts and servers contain troves of valuable private information dating back years, they are easy to compromise. This makes them attractive targets for adversaries. Attackers often use methods such as spear-phishing, password recovery and reset, and social engineering attacks to obtain a victim's email credentials. With login details in hand, attackers then simply authenticate to the appropriate mail service like a normal user and siphon off all of the victim's emails.

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Making It Easier to Encrypt Your Emails (PDF)

Article Section:

SECURITY